Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Derek Thompson

3 Theories for Why You Have No Time

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Thu, 26 Dec 2019 11:00:00 -0500

One of the truisms of modern life is that nobody has any time. Everybody is busy, burned out, swamped, overwhelmed. So let’s try a simple thought experiment. Imagine that you came into possession of a magical new set of technologies that could automate or expedite every single part of your job.

What would you do with the extra time? Maybe you’d pick up a hobby, or have more children, or learn to luxuriate in the additional leisure. But what if I told you that you wouldn’t do any of those things: You would just work the exact same amount of time as before.

I can’t prove this, because I don’t know you. What I do know is that something remarkably similar to my hypothetical happened in the U.S. economy in the 20th century—not in factories, or in modern offices. But inside American homes.

The household economy of cooking, cleaning, mending, washing, and grocery shopping has arguably changed more in the past 100 years than the American factory or the modern office. And its evolution tells an illuminating story about why, no matter what work we do, we never seem to have enough time. In the 20th century, labor-saving household technology improved dramatically, but no labor appears to have been saved.

Technologically, the typical American home of 1900 wasn’t so different from the typical home of 1500. Bereft of modern equipment, it had no electricity. Although some rich families had indoor plumbing, most did not. Family members were responsible for ferrying each drop of water in and out of the house.

The following decades brought a bevy of labor-saving appliances. Air conditioning and modern toilets, for starters. But also refrigerators and freezers, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, and dishwashers.

These machines worked miracles. Electric stoves made food prep faster. Automatic washers and dryers cut the time needed to clean a load of clothes. Refrigerators meant that housewives and the help didn’t have to worry about buying fresh food every other day.

Each of these innovations could have saved hours of labor. But none of them did. At first, these new machines compensated for the decline in home servants. (They helped cause that decline, as well.) Then housework expanded to fill the available hours. In 1920, full-time housewives spent 51 hours a week on housework, according to Juliet Schor, an economist and the author of The Overworked American. In the 1950s, they worked 52 hours a week. In the 1960s, they worked 53 hours. Half a century of labor-saving technology does not appear to have saved the typical housewife even one minute of labor.

This might seem impossible. But there are three simple reasons for this—and each has clear implications for why a combination of individual psychology and structural forces makes it so hard for Americans to find more time, even in an economy that is becoming ever more rich and technologically sophisticated.

Better technology means higher expectations—and higher expectations create more work.

For most of history, humans blithely languished in their own filth. Most families’ clothes were washed on a semi-annual basis, and body odor was inescapable. The fleet of housework technologies that sprang into the world between the late-19th and mid-20th century created new norms of cleanliness—for our floors, our clothes, ourselves.

New norms meant more work. Automatic washers and dryers raised our expectations for clean clothes and encouraged people to go out and buy new shirts and pants; housewives therefore had more loads of laundry to wash, dry, and fold. As one 1920s housewife wrote, of her new dusting and mopping and furniture-polish technology, “because we housewives of today have the tools to reach it, we dig every day after dust that grandmother left to a spring cataclysm.”

New home tech also created new kinds of work that absorbed the extra time. For example, refrigerators made it easier to keep food fresh and electric ovens made it faster to cook. But housewives used this convenience to spend more time driving to the supermarket to buy fresh produce to stock the fridge. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, Schor writes, time spent prepping food fell by about 10 hours a week. But time spent shopping for food increased, in part thanks to another 20th-century invention: the supermarket.

In short, technology made it much easier to clean a house to 1890s standards. But by mid-century, Americans didn’t want that old house. They wanted a modern home—with delicious meals and dustless windowsills and glistening floors—and this delicious and dustless glisten required a 40-to-50-hour workweek, even with the assistance of modern tools.

In the 1950s, a British civil servant coined the term Parkinson’s Law to explain the phenomenon that “work expands to fill the available time.” The rule first described the seemingly infinite busywork of government bureaucracies. But it might also apply to housework. Expectations rose, and work expanded to fill the available time.

This story offers one explanation for why leisure hasn’t much increased for many rich workers in the 21st century. We’d collectively prefer more money and more stuff rather than more downtime. We are victims of the curse of want.

A lot of modern overwork is class and status maintenance—for this generation and the next.

As technology has reduced the time it takes to cook a meal or wash a shirt, it's opened up more hours in the day to care for other parts of the house. Such as the little humans living in it.

In the past few decades, child care has been the fastest-growing component of housework. Since the 1980s, American parents—and particularly college-educated mothers and fathers—have nearly doubled the amount of time they spend raising, teaching, driving, and helping their kids. The economist Valerie Ramey chalks it up to a “rug rat race” led by middle- and upper-class parents devoting more hours to prepare their kids for competitive college admissions and a cutthroat labor force.

Ramey sees the rug rat race as, in part, an anxious status- and income-maintenance ritual for the college-educated class. “When my husband [the economist Gary Ramey] and I first looked at this, the research was semi-autobiographical, because we couldn’t believe the amount of pressure our friends were putting on their kids to get ready for college,” she told me. “In the old regime, college-educated parents could get their kids into good schools because the marginal slot was being filled by a first-generation college student,” she said. But today, far more children of college-educated parents are competing for a finite number of seats.

Many young people concerned with burnout don’t have kids. But their motivations are an extension of the same impulse behind concerted parenting—they, too, feel like participants in a pseudo-meritocratic rat race, and they’re terrified of losing status, class, or future income. Young YouTube stars work to exhaustion to meet the expectations of an algorithm that prizes daily content. Lawyers and consultants work overtime to prove to their bosses that they will sacrifice every shred of their personal life to help their firms crush global rivals. Some of these rat-race participants might truly be on the brink of financial emergency. But a lot of them are yuppie workists who have made a secular religion out of the pursuit of status and professional fulfillment. Like Valerie Ramey’s friends, their overwork isn’t so much about avoiding poverty as it is about avoiding the psychically difficult prospect that life, in this generation and the next, isn’t an infinite escalator.

These first two explanations might be compelling, but they’re also incomplete. They both imply that housework and modern work are things that workers have total agency over, when, in fact, most people’s working lives are not entirely theirs to control.

Technology only frees people from work if the boss—or the government, or the economic system—allows it.

Many stay-at-home moms, today and throughout the last century, have been happy to play their crucial role in the family economy. But one thing that Schor emphasizes is that underinvestment in women, and low expectations about their potential in the labor force, have played a big role in forcing many would-be woman employees to stay out of the workforce.

“I think the biggest reason that labor-saving technology in the home didn’t actually reduce labor for housewives is that the opportunity cost of women’s labor was socially valued at zero,” Schor told me. “By that I mean, a lot of men wanted their wives to keep busy but assumed that they would be worthless outside the home, as salaried workers, like lawyers or doctors.” Many women were caught between the husband’s expectation that they be useful and a male-dominated society that blocked them from education and salaried labor. As a result, they had little choice but to spend their full 40- to 50-hour workweek preparing the home for the family.

Housework hours finally fell only when women joined the labor force en masse. Since the 1960s, the share of women in the workforce has increased by about 50 percent. In that time, the typical adult woman has decreased her housework hours by about one-third, according to analysis by the economist Valerie Ramey. That is, the one thing that finally reduced labor in the home was … labor outside of the home.

What does this history tell us about life in the 21st century? Bosses set hours and income, and workers adjust. When husbands controlled their wives’ schedules, they insisted on a clean and tidy home and a ready-made dinner; and their wives typically obliged. When today’s employers hire a full-time worker under modern labor laws, they insist on a 40-hour week, or more; and the worker typically obliges. It doesn’t matter whether technology stays the same, or improves by leaps and bounds. The workweek is fixed and predetermined. A meaningful, economy-wide reduction in work hours would likely require changing the laws that determine the relationship between employers and employees.

Let’s return to the original question: Why don’t Americans have more free time? In my experience, the debate over labor and leisure is often fought between the Self-Helpers and the Socialists. The Self-Helpers say that individuals have agency to solve their problems and can reduce their anxiety through new habits and values. The Socialists say that this individualist ethos is a dangerous myth. Instead, they insist that almost all modern anxieties arise from structural inequalities that require structural solutions, like a dramatic reconfiguration of the economy and stronger labor laws to protect worker rights.

The history of American housework suggests that both sides have a point. Americans tend to use new productivity and technology to buy a better life rather than to enjoy more downtime in inferior conditions. And when material concerns are mostly met, Americans fixate on their status and class, and that of their children, and work tirelessly to preserve and grow it.

But most Americans don’t have the economic or political power to negotiate a better deal for themselves. Their working hours and income are shaped by higher powers, like bosses, federal laws, and societal expectations.

To solve the problems of overwork and time starvation, we have to recognize both that individuals have the agency to make small changes to improve their lives and that, without broader changes to our laws and norms and social expectations, no amount of overwork will ever be enough.

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The Not-Com Bubble Is Popping

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 14:00:00 -0400

It is easy to look at today’s crop of sinking IPOs—like Uber, Lyft, and Peloton—or scuttled public offerings, like WeWork, and see an eerie resemblance to the dot-com bubble that popped in 2000.

Both then and now, consumer-tech companies spent lavishly on advertising and struggled to find a path to profit.
Both then and now, companies that bragged about their ability to change the world admitted suddenly that they were running out of money.
Both then and now, the valuations of once-heralded tech enterprises were halved in a matter of weeks.
Both then and now, there was a widespread sense of euphoria curdling into soberness, washed down with the realization that thousands of workers in once-promising firms were poised to lose their jobs.

But if you look closer, today’s correction isn’t much like the dot-com bubble at all. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that what’s happening today is the very opposite of the dot-com bubble.

Let’s first understand what exactly that bubble was: a mania of stock speculation, in which ordinary investors—from taxi drivers to Laundromat owners to shoe-shiners—bid up the price of internet-related companies for no good reason other than “because, internet.” Companies realized that they could boost their stock price by simply adding the prefix e- (as in “e-Bay”) or the suffix com (as in Amazon.com) to their corporate names to entice, and arguably fool, nonprofessionals. “Americans could hardly run an errand without picking up a stock tip,” The New York Times reported in its postmortem.

As prices became untethered from reality, the Nasdaq index doubled in value between 1999 and 2000 without “any plausible candidate for fundamental news to support such a large revaluation,” as the economists J. Bradford DeLong and Konstantin Magin wrote in a paper on the bubble. The crash was equally swift and arbitrary. Between February 2000 and February 2002, the NASDAQ lost three-quarters of its value “again without substantial negative fundamental news,” DeLong and Magin wrote. By late 2000, more than $5 trillion in wealth had been wiped out. This sudden rise and sudden collapse in asset prices—without much change in information about the underlying assets—is the very definition of a bubble.

The current situation is different, in at least two important ways.

First, in the dot-com bubble, public investors got hosed. Today, it’s public investors that are doing the hosing.

When the web browser Netscape went public on August 9, 1995—the day many cite as the beginning of the dot-com bubble—its stock skyrocketed from $28 to $75 in a matter of hours, even though the company wasn’t profitable. In today’s market, the opposite is happening: Unicorns with no positive earnings are getting slaughtered at the gates. WeWork’s valuation fell more than 80 percent pre-IPO when investors balked at its mounting losses. Peloton, Lyft, and Uber have also struggled to persuade public markets to grade them on a curve; all saw their stock prices fall on the day of the public offering. Institutions and retail investors are refusing to fork over to unicorns the valuations that private investors were expecting—particularly Softbank, a major backer of Uber, Lyft, and WeWork.

This isn’t a picture of mass mania. It’s a picture of public sobriety, where the masses are diagnosing an acute fever in private markets.

Second, there is little sign of a crisis for firms whose main product is pure software.

Judging from the news, you might think this has been a terrible year for technology companies. But tech IPOs have been strong for the past two years, “as long as what you’re buying is actually a real tech company,” JP Morgan’s chair of market and investment strategy, Michael Cembalest, wrote in an October 7 research note. By “real tech,” Cembalest was referring to companies whose principal product is software, rather than, say, WeWork, which is in truth a real-estate company caught wearing an Actual Tech Company costume before Halloween.

You might not have heard about these “real tech” companies—like Zscaler, Anaplan, and Smartsheet—because they mostly sell business-to-business software or cloud services. But all of them are trading more than 100 percent above their listed IPO price. The problematic firms, Cemablest wrote, are those that aren’t pure tech. Either they sell hardware plus software (like the stationary-bike company Peloton) or they own a digital marketplace for humans to transact goods and services in the physical world, like Uber, Fiverr, and Lyft. All those companies are trading below their IPO price.

This underlines one of the quiet truisms of the state of technology in 2019: Consumer tech grabs most of the headlines. But enterprise tech, whose top clients are other businesses, grabs most of the profit. For example, everybody knows that Amazon is a dominant retailer. What they might not know is that Amazon now makes two-thirds of its profit from Amazon Web Services, its cloud-computing platform. (From an earnings standpoint, it is not too cheeky to say that Amazon is a data-storage provider with a secondary e-commerce division.) Meanwhile, Google’s cloud business is growing rapidly, and Microsoft’s cloud-computing product, Azure, has helped to make it the most valuable company in the world.

The problem with tech today isn’t so much that software failed to eat the world, but that the most celebrated unicorns weren’t actually software companies. They have struggled to achieve liftoff because their feet are stuck in the mud of the physical world—whether it’s labor costs for Uber and Lyft, or real-estate costs for WeWork. These upstart renegades are getting cut down in the public square, while enterprise-software companies are building profitable businesses by selling shovels at the gold rush—or cloud services at the consumer-tech fair.

What we’re seeing today isn’t a dot-com bubble. If anything, it’s a not-com bubble—a period of inflated expectations for companies that had no business being valued like pure tech companies in the first place.

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Workism Is Making Americans Miserable

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 12:00:00 -0500

In his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour workweek in the 21st century, creating the equivalent of a five-day weekend. “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem,” Keynes wrote, “how to occupy the leisure.”

This became a popular view. In a 1957 article in The New York Times, the writer Erik Barnouw predicted that, as work became easier, our identity would be defined by our hobbies, or our family life. “The increasingly automatic nature of many jobs, coupled with the shortening work week [leads] an increasing number of workers to look not to work but to leisure for satisfaction, meaning, expression,” he wrote.

These post-work predictions weren’t entirely wrong. By some counts, Americans work much less than they used to. The average work year has shrunk by more than 200 hours. But those figures don’t tell the whole story. Rich, college-educated people—especially men—work more than they did many decades ago. They are reared from their teenage years to make their passion their career and, if they don’t have a calling, told not to yield until they find one.

The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism.

1. The Gospel of Work

The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms. Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.

What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.

Homo industrious is not new to the American landscape. The American dream—that hoary mythology that hard work always guarantees upward mobility—has for more than a century made the U.S. obsessed with material success and the exhaustive striving required to earn it.

No large country in the world as productive as the United States averages more hours of work a year. And the gap between the U.S. and other countries is growing. Between 1950 and 2012, annual hours worked per employee fell by about 40 percent in Germany and the Netherlands—but by only 10 percent in the United States. Americans “work longer hours, have shorter vacations, get less in unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits, and retire later, than people in comparably rich societies,” wrote Samuel P. Huntington in his 2005 book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity.

One group has led the widening of the workist gap: rich men.

In 1980, the highest-earning men actually worked fewer hours per week than middle-class and low-income men, according to a survey by the Minneapolis Fed. But that’s changed. By 2005, the richest 10 percent of married men had the longest average workweek. In that same time, college-educated men reduced their leisure time more than any other group. Today, it is fair to say that elite American men have transformed themselves into the world’s premier workaholics, toiling longer hours than both poorer men in the U.S. and rich men in similarly rich countries.

This shift defies economic logic—and economic history. The rich have always worked less than the poor, because they could afford to. The landed gentry of preindustrial Europe dined, danced, and gossiped, while serfs toiled without end. In the early 20th century, rich Americans used their ample downtime to buy weekly movie tickets and dabble in sports. Today’s rich American men can afford vastly more downtime. But they have used their wealth to buy the strangest of prizes: more work!

Perhaps long hours are part of an arms race for status and income among the moneyed elite. Or maybe the logic here isn’t economic at all. It’s emotional—even spiritual. The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves. “For many of today’s rich there is no such thing as ‘leisure’; in the classic sense—work is their play,” the economist Robert Frank wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “Building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”

Workism may have started with rich men, but the ethos is spreading—across gender and age. In a 2018 paper on elite universities, researchers found that for women, the most important benefit of attending a selective college isn’t higher wages, but more hours at the office. In other words, our elite institutions are minting coed workists. What’s more, in a recent Pew Research report on the epidemic of youth anxiety, 95 percent of teens said “having a job or career they enjoy” would be “extremely or very important” to them as an adult. This ranked higher than any other priority, including “helping other people who are in need” (81 percent) or getting married (47 percent). Finding meaning at work beats family and kindness as the top ambition of today’s young people.

Even as Americans worship workism, its leaders consecrate it from the marble daises of Congress and enshrine it in law. Most advanced countries give new parents paid leave; but the United States guarantees no such thing. Many advanced countries ease the burden of parenthood with national policies; but U.S. public spending on child care and early education is near the bottom of international rankings. In most advanced countries, citizens are guaranteed access to health care by their government; but the majority of insured Americans get health care through—where else?—their workplace. Automation and AI may soon threaten the labor force, but America’s welfare system has become more work-based in the past 20 years. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which replaced much of the existing welfare system with programs that made benefits contingent on the recipient’s employment.

The religion of work isn’t just a cultist feature of America’s elite. It’s also the law.

Here’s a fair question: Is there anything wrong with hard, even obsessive, work?

Humankind has not yet invented itself out of labor. Machine intelligence isn’t ready to run the world’s factories, or care for the sick. In every advanced economy, most prime-age people who can work do—and in poorer countries, the average workweek is even longer than in the United States. Without work, including nonsalaried labor like raising a child, most people tend to feel miserable. Some evidence suggests that long-term unemployment is even more wrenching than losing a loved one, since the absence of an engaging distraction removes the very thing that tends to provide solace to mourners in the first place.

There is nothing wrong with work, when work must be done. And there is no question that an elite obsession with meaningful work will produce a handful of winners who hit the workist lottery: busy, rich, and deeply fulfilled. But a culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualization into salaried jobs is setting itself up for collective anxiety, mass disappointment, and inevitable burnout.

In the past century, the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings—from necessity to status to meaning. In an agrarian or early-manufacturing economy, where tens of millions of people perform similar routinized tasks, there are no delusions about the higher purpose of, say, planting corn or screwing bolts: It’s just a job.

The rise of the professional class and corporate bureaucracies in the early 20th century created the modern journey of a career, a narrative arc bending toward a set of precious initials: VP, SVP, CEO. The upshot is that for today’s workists, anything short of finding one’s vocational soul mate means a wasted life.

“We’ve created this idea that the meaning of life should be found in work,” says Oren Cass, the author of the book The Once and Future Worker. “We tell young people that their work should be their passion. ‘Don’t give up until you find a job that you love!’ we say. ‘You should be changing the world!’ we tell them. That is the message in commencement addresses, in pop culture, and frankly, in media, including The Atlantic.”

But our desks were never meant to be our altars. The modern labor force evolved to serve the needs of consumers and capitalists, not to satisfy tens of millions of people seeking transcendence at the office. It’s hard to self-actualize on the job if you’re a cashier—one of the most common occupations in the U.S.—and even the best white-collar roles have long periods of stasis, boredom, or busywork. This mismatch between expectations and reality is a recipe for severe disappointment, if not outright misery, and it might explain why rates of depression and anxiety in the U.S. are “substantially higher” than they were in the 1980s, according to a 2014 study.

One of the benefits of being an observant Christian, Muslim, or Zoroastrian is that these God-fearing worshippers put their faith in an intangible and unfalsifiable force of goodness. But work is tangible, and success is often falsified. To make either the centerpiece of one’s life is to place one’s esteem in the mercurial hands of the market. To be a workist is to worship a god with firing power.

2. The Millennial Workist

The Millennial generation—born in the past two decades of the 20th century—came of age in the roaring 1990s, when workism coursed through the veins of American society. On the West Coast, the modern tech sector emerged, minting millionaires who combined utopian dreams with a do-what-you-love ethos. On the East Coast, President Clinton grabbed the neoliberal baton from Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and signed laws that made work the nucleus of welfare policy.

As Anne Helen Petersen wrote in a viral essay on “Millennial burnout” for BuzzFeed News—building on ideas Malcolm Harris addressed in his book, Kids These Days—Millennials were honed in these decades into machines of self-optimization. They passed through a childhood of extracurricular overachievement and checked every box of the success sequence, only to have the economy blow up their dreams.

While it’s inadvisable to paint 85 million people with the same brush, it’s fair to say that American Millennials have been collectively defined by two external traumas. The first is student debt. Millennials are the most educated generation ever, a distinction that should have made them rich and secure. But rising educational attainment has come at a steep price. Since 2007, outstanding student debt has grown by almost $1 trillion, roughly tripling in just 12 years. And since the economy cratered in 2008, average wages for young graduates have stagnated—making it even harder to pay off loans.

The second external trauma of the Millennial generation has been the disturbance of social media, which has amplified the pressure to craft an image of success—for oneself, for one’s friends and colleagues, and even for one’s parents. But literally visualizing career success can be difficult in a services and information economy. Blue-collar jobs produce tangible products, like coal, steel rods, and houses. The output of white-collar work—algorithms, consulting projects, programmatic advertising campaigns—is more shapeless and often quite invisible. It’s not glib to say that the whiter the collar, the more invisible the product.

Since the physical world leaves few traces of achievement, today’s workers turn to social media to make manifest their accomplishments. Many of them spend hours crafting a separate reality of stress-free smiles, postcard vistas, and Edison-lightbulbed working spaces. “The social media feed [is] evidence of the fruits of hard, rewarding labor and the labor itself,” Petersen writes.

Among Millennial workers, it seems, overwork and “burnout” are outwardly celebrated (even if, one suspects, they’re inwardly mourned). In a recent New York Times essay, “Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?,” the reporter Erin Griffith pays a visit to the co-working space WeWork, where the pillows urge do what you love, and the neon signs implore workers to hustle harder. These dicta resonate with young workers. As several studies show, Millennials are meaning junkies at work. “Like all employees,” one Gallup survey concluded, “millennials care about their income. But for this generation, a job is about more than a paycheck, it’s about a purpose.”

The problem with this gospel—Your dream job is out there, so never stop hustling—is that it’s a blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion. Long hours don’t make anybody more productive or creative; they make people stressed, tired and bitter. But the overwork myths survive “because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies,” Griffith writes.

There is something slyly dystopian about an economic system that has convinced the most indebted generation in American history to put purpose over paycheck. Indeed, if you were designing a Black Mirror labor force that encouraged overwork without higher wages, what might you do? Perhaps you’d persuade educated young people that income comes second; that no job is just a job; and that the only real reward from work is the ineffable glow of purpose. It is a diabolical game that creates a prize so tantalizing yet rare that almost nobody wins, but everybody feels obligated to play forever.

3. Time for Happiness

This is the right time for a confession. I am the very thing that I am criticizing.

I am devoted to my job. I feel most myself when I am fulfilled by my work—including the work of writing an essay about work. My sense of identity is so bound up in my job, my sense of accomplishment, and my feeling of productivity that bouts of writer’s block can send me into an existential funk that can spill over into every part of my life. And I know enough writers, tech workers, marketers, artists, and entrepreneurs to know that my affliction is common, especially within a certain tranche of the white-collar workforce.

Some workists, moreover, seem deeply fulfilled. These happy few tend to be intrinsically motivated; they don’t need to share daily evidence of their accomplishments. But maintaining the purity of internal motivations is harder in a world where social media and mass media are so adamant about externalizing all markers of success. There’s Forbes’ list of this, and Fortune’s list of that; and every Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn profile is conspicuously marked with the metrics of accomplishment—followers, friends, viewers, retweets—that inject all communication with the features of competition. It may be getting harder each year for purely motivated and sincerely happy workers to opt out of the tournament of labor swirling around them.

Workism offers a perilous trade-off. On the one hand, Americans’ high regard for hard work may be responsible for its special place in world history and its reputation as the global capital of start-up success. A culture that worships the pursuit of extreme success will likely produce some of it. But extreme success is a falsifiable god, which rejects the vast majority of its worshippers. Our jobs were never meant to shoulder the burdens of a faith, and they are buckling under the weight. A staggering 87 percent of employees are not engaged at their job, according to Gallup. That number is rising by the year.

One solution to this epidemic of disengagement would be to make work less awful. But maybe the better prescription is to make work less central.

This can start with public policy. There is new enthusiasm for universal policies—like universal basic income, parental leave, subsidized child care, and a child allowance—which would make long working hours less necessary for all Americans. These changes alone might not be enough to reduce Americans’ devotion to work for work’s sake, since it’s the rich who are most devoted. But they would spare the vast majority of the public from the pathological workaholism that grips today’s elites, and perhaps create a bottom-up movement to displace work as the centerpiece of the secular American identity.

On a deeper level, Americans have forgotten an old-fashioned goal of working: It’s about buying free time. The vast majority of workers are happier when they spend more hours with family, friends, and partners, according to research conducted by Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. In one study, she concluded that the happiest young workers were those who said around the time of their college graduation that they preferred careers that gave them time away from the office to focus on their relationships and their hobbies.

How quaint that sounds. But it’s the same perspective that inspired the economist John Maynard Keynes to predict in 1930 that Americans would eventually have five-day weekends, rather than five-day weeks. It is the belief—the faith, even—that work is not life’s product, but its currency. What we choose to buy with it is the ultimate project of living.

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Why Flying Cars Are an Impossible Dream

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 12:00:00 -0500

The flying car is the Godot of technology: always on its way, never here. Ninety years ago, Henry Ford envisioned an experimental one-seat airplane called the sky flivver, only to abandon the project when one of the first prototypes crashed, killing the pilot. In the 1950s, the U.S. Army commissioned the development of “flying jeeps” with private-sector partners like Chrysler. The project never amounted to much. Today, flying cars figure most prominently not in urban skylines, but in venture-capital tag lines,as in Peter Thiel’s motto: “We wanted flying cars; instead, we got 140 characters.” (James Fallows has for many years chronicled the ascendant hopes and stalled realities of air-taxi development around the world.)

Now tech firms again insist that their Godot is finally coming—but, seriously. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, the most buzzed-about product was probably Uber’s autonomous air taxi. The ride-hailing company has said that it hopes to roll out an air-travel business by 2023. And last week, Boeing debuted a “personal air vehicle,” an electric-plane prototype.

“Global transit is going 3-D in the next 10 years,” Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, on a panel with the chief executives from Uber and UPS. “Advanced propulsion, low-orbit travel, space tourism,” he went on, listing a variety of forthcoming airborne technology: “We know how to do this.” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi agreed that urban transportation is at an inflection point—from cars and trains to drones and planes. “We want to make the city three-dimensional,” Khosrowshahi said, echoing a theme.

But flying cars, air taxis, or to employ the industry term, “vertical takeoff and landing technology,” have their share of doubters. Elon Musk, who typically serves as Big Tech’s mascot of industrial optimism, has said that flying-car dreams have a “fundamental flaw”: They’ll always be too inconvenient for urban commuters to rely on for daily transportation. (Musk has founded at least two transportation companies, but they’re focused on digging urban tunnels and rocketing to Mars.)

Cities aren’t about to let hastily trained pilots commandeer thousand-pound machines and human passengers. The alternative, which is to let autonomous pilots commandeer thousand-pound machines and human passengers, is no more likely. If the world has learned one thing about autonomous technology in the past decade, it’s this: Autonomy is hard. It’s really, really hard. Even self-driving advocates admit that in 2018, the hype around driverless cars came “crashing down.” And speaking of crashing down, the consequences of a self-driving error for an air taxi would be calamitous: a machine the size of a small car hurtling hundreds of feet per second toward a skyscraper, house, or crowded intersection.

“I think the idea of air taxis is kind of bullshit,” Carlo Ratti, an architect and urban theorist who serves as director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, told me. “Technology can change many things, but it cannot change physics. Helicopters are loud and expensive and, for most forms of transportation, inconvenient.” As near-silent electric and hybrid cars take over the road, the sound of a fleet of flying vehicles buzzing overhead will be even more obvious.

To address this noise problem, companies such as Boeing, Airbus, and Uber are plowing billions of dollars into technologies such as electric propulsion, which could be quieter and more reliable than a combustion engine. But building a fleet of electric-powered aircraft that shuttle passengers hundreds of miles between charges would require heroic advances in battery-energy density.

The chief executives at Davos acknowledged these challenges—and identified others. What kind of city infrastructure would be necessary for autonomous flying machines to take off and land (and charge) within the city? Why would dense, expensive cities like San Francisco approve the construction of dozens of vertical platforms if simply building sufficient apartment buildings is already difficult? How would companies like Boeing achieve the economies of scale required to efficiently manufacture tens of thousands, if not millions, of air taxis without clear signals of consumer demand and city regulatory approval? Good questions.

Several years ago, technologists and transportation companies insisted that self-driving cars would be significant parts of the urban landscape by the early 2020s. That hope is proving illusory. But instead of accepting defeat, the mobility-tech world is shifting its laser beam of optimism from self-driving Earth taxis to self-driving air taxis.

“The last 30 to 40 years in technology have been about digitizing the physical world,” Ratti said. “Experimentation has been easy for tech, because in the digital space, you can test and test infinitely. But the next 30 years will be about building technology that bridges the digital and the physical worlds. It’s a much harder challenge.”

If flying cars have a near-term future, it’s probably not urban. Rural areas—where commutes are long and interruptive skyscrapers are scarce—are the more likely initial setting for airborne technology. Once drones and flying cars prove out in Idaho, perhaps they will migrate to Manhattan. Or not. Flying cars might ultimately be the rare Davos dream that actually makes more sense for a small town like Davos than it does for the major cities its attendees represent.

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How the Grinch Bots Stole Christmas

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 12:00:00 -0500

Good tech gone bad! Nefarious nerds! Dubious online platforms! Predatory late capitalism! Imagine if every tech and business motif from the past 12 months gathered to celebrate an end-of-year reunion in a single story.

This is that story. It is the story of the Fingerlings and the Grinch bots.

We begin, as Christmas stories sometimes do, in a toy store. Every holiday season has its must-have gizmo, like Cabbage Patch Kids or Tickle Me Elmo. This year’s sensation is the Fingerling, a plastic five-inch-tall baby monkey. Engineered to cling to an outstretched finger with its plastic hands and feet, the toy giggles, burps, and farts in response to petting and shaking. Imagine a manic pygmy marmoset robot with minor gastrointestinal issues, and you get the picture.

Many years ago, in the days when malls ruled the world, adoring mothers and fathers fearing the wrath of a wanting child would storm into stores and shove each other across aisles to grab a toy like the Fingerling. These days, however, the battle royale over popular toys has shifted online, where the dangers are more exotic than a mother’s flying elbow.

The new holiday showdown pits humans against software. It’s not a fair fight. A fleet of bots—software programs that can automate activities like search, chat, and online ordering—have been dispatched by anonymous online scalpers to buy up the most popular children’s toys on the internet. These bots overwhelm retail sites with bulk orders from multiple IP addresses and autofill payment and address information faster than humanly possible. Hence, the apt nickname: Grinch bots.

Fingerlings are currently sold out at the websites of Toys “R” Us, Walmart, and Target. Where did the toys go? To sites like Amazon and eBay, where the bots’ owners are listing the $15 playthings for $1,000, or more. (It’s not clear who these people are, but they evidently possess programming chops, yet no soul.) Cyber scalpers have used the same methods to deplete online retailers of other toys, like Barbie Hello Dreamhouse and L.O.L. Surprise! Doll, which they can resell at exorbitant prices. While offline toy scalpers and online ticket scalpers are an old trend, this seems to be the first case of mass-scale online toy scalping.

Retailers have failed to block the bots, and platforms have refused to stop the sellers. For example, eBay has claimed that there’s little it can do to halt the legal exchange of toys. “As an open marketplace, eBay is a global indicator of trends in which supply and demand dictate the pricing of items,” the company said in a statement. “As long as the item is legal to sell and complies with our policies, it can be sold on eBay.” The Grinch bots are not technically stealing or defrauding. They are practicing a form of legally sanctioned ransom.

The yuletide fleecing of middle-class parents has attracted political attention. “Grinch bots cannot be allowed to steal Christmas, or dollars, from the wallets of New Yorkers,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York said. He has proposed legislation that bans bots on retail sites, expanding a law that already prohibits the use of bulk-buying tickets for concerts or theater. That law’s name is the Better Online Ticket Sales Act—or the BOTS Act.

But even if fines make scalpers fear, the law won’t pass before this year. As Grinch bots reap and hoard playthings, ‘twill be too late for Fingerlings.

* * *

Why is this story so fitting for 2017? The Grinch bot drama mashes together two moral panics about once-celebrated tech stories—platforms and automation—and sprinkles them with dread about predatory capitalism. Beyond the nimbus of presidential scandal and the watershed revelations of sexual harassment, these fears have dominated the tech and business news cycles this year.

1. The Dark Side of Platforms

A platform is a digital interface that offers consumers access to a wide range of products, which the platform itself doesn’t necessarily own. Think Netflix for video, or Google for information. In a widely shared 2015 essay, Tom Goodwin, a writer and marketing strategist, summarized the spectacle of platforms tech this way:

Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

He was right: Something interesting is happening. But while Goodwin’s summary inspired sunny optimism back in 2015, the last 12 months have revealed the dark side of platforms, which often serve as clearinghouses of human indecency. Propaganda has thrived on Twitter, Google search results have elevated false breaking news stories, and Uber devised a controversial program called “greyball” to maneuver cars away from regulators trying to bust illegal ride-hailing. Most dramatically, a former executive at Facebook now claims the company is “ripping apart” society.

These scandals have not always damaged these companies’ utility or profit; while Uber’s valuation has declined, Facebook and Google’s stocks have grown dramatically. But they have pierced the prevailing techno-optimism by calling attention, again and again, to the same question: How can users trust platforms that are often no better than the worst of their users? That query has special resonance for families who are victims of today’s cyber scalpers. These high-tech scoundrels have scammed online retailers and turned the laissez faire rules of eBay’s platform against the interests of its shoppers. Like the Russian propagandists on Facebook and Twitter, the cyber scalpers succeeded, not by flouting their platforms rules, but by mastering them.

2. The Dark Side of Automation

Bots and artificial intelligence have been hailed as the next great technological breakthrough. They populate a vision of a future where corporate bots replace customer-service agents and where personal AI assistants help people shop or manage household tasks, like Her, or, less creepily, Jarvis. In this future, bots serve as automators of tedium and toil, allowing companies and individuals to focus on what really matters to them.

But in the last 12 months, bots have been mastered by trolls and scam artists. They have automated the worst elements of human nature—the instinct to deceive, ridicule, and extort. Immediately after the first presidential debate last year, more than a third of pro-Trump tweets (and about a fifth of pro-Clinton tweets) came from bots. Facebook and Twitter were flooded with bots that, in mimicking the most obnoxious users, merely amplified the sites’ worst tendencies. These “bot-makers see an opportunity to exploit anonymity with a humanlike touch at an inhuman scale,” John Herrman wrote for The New York Times.

It is a perfect description for the Grinch bot programmers, as well. Scalping is an ancient practice. But cyber scalping allows these scammers to operate at an inhumanly vast scale and with inhuman speed, so that they can absorb the entire supply of popular toys at Walmart and Target’s websites.

3. The Predation of “Late Capitalism”

Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is feminism—a worthy selection. But in economic circles, perhaps no term has been more emblematic of 2017 than the ubiquitous yet amorphous “late capitalism.”

The concept sounds vaguely Marxist. But it wasn’t coined by Karl Marx himself, according to William Clare Roberts, a political scientist at McGill University interviewed by The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey. Rather, he said, the term came from Marxist acolytes alluding to the darkness that comes just before the dawn of socialism, the moment when “we see the ligaments of the international system that socialists will be able to seize and use.”

It’s hard to imagine a better advertisement for switching economic systems than anonymous scalpers ripping off well-intentioned parents in the name of free markets. But that’s essentially the attitude of the Grinch-bot coders and their ilk. Last year, two brothers bought a stockpile of Hatchimals—the it-toy of 2016—to force families to pay large markups to get the toy. It was like an analog version of the Grinch-bot scandal. Interviewed by Time magazine, the brothers were remorseless; in fact, they were proud. “We didn’t break any laws,” one brother, Mike Zappa, said. “And we aren’t dictating how the market is pricing the toys on eBay. What we are doing is capitalism at its best.”

It’s a shameless defense. But it’s not so different from the argument lurking in eBay’s corporate statement, which implies Grinch bots aren’t a scandal, because their behavior is technically legal. Indeed, that makes a fine summary for the worst storylines of the year, from politics to tech to business. Sometimes, the scandal is what’s permissible.

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Why Nerds and Nurses Are Taking Over the U.S. Economy

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 15:00:00 -0400

Manufacturing will fall. Retail will wobble. Automation will inch along but stay off the roads, for now. The rich will keep getting richer. And more and more of the country will be paid to take care of old people. That is the future of the labor market, according to the latest 10-year forecast from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

These 10-year forecasts—the products of two years’ work from about 25 economists at the BLS —document the government’s best assessment of the fastest and slowest growing jobs of the future. On the decline are automatable work, like typists, and occupations threatened by changing consumer behavior, like clothing store cashiers, as more people shop online.

The fastest-growing jobs through 2026 belong to what one might call the Three Cs: care, computers, and clean energy. No occupation is projected to add more workers than personal-care aides, who perform non-medical duties for older Americans, such as bathing and cooking. Along with home-health aides, these two occupations are projected to create 1.1 million new jobs in the next decade. Remarkably, that’s 10 percent of the total 11.5 million jobs that the BLS expects the economy to add. Clean-energy workers, like solar-panel installers and wind-turbine technicians, are the only occupations that are expected to double by 2026. Mathematicians and statisticians round out the top-10 list.

BLS

These projections aren't just a fun experiment for economic forecasters and journalists who need unfalsifiable predictions to write about. They can help college students pick their major—for example, the projected growth of statisticians augurs well for math—and shape debates about government spending.

At times, however, it seems like nobody at the highest level of government has any clue these reports exist. When President Donald Trump talks about the future of the economy, he often praises steel workers and manufacturers. But manufacturing is the only major industry projected to decline in the next decade, and steelworkers are projected to add just 9,000 jobs in the next 10 years. That is about the same as the projected increase in drama and music professors at private colleges, an occupation that no politician considers symbolic of the American idea (sad!).

Here are the four major themes of the employment projections.

Health care will take over—or, continue its long takeover of—the economy.

The funny thing about getting old is that, outside of Christopher Nolan films, it is a one-speed phenomenon, which does not yield itself to sudden and surprising news headlines—e.g., Scientists Stunned As Springfield’s Population Ages 10 Years in One Weekend. But the greying of the U.S. is quietly one of the nation’s most important economic events.

Aging explains, for example, why jobs are projected to grow 50 percent slower in the next decade than they did between 1996 and 2006. It explains why, since the mid-1990s, the share of the labor force over 55 will have doubled by the mid-2020s—from 12 percent to 25 percent. It may explain the nation’s declining productivity. And it explains why the future of the economy is health care.

Health care’s statistical dominance of the emerging labor force is stunning. Of the 10 jobs projected to grow fastest by percent, five are in health care and elderly assistance. Those five occupations—personal care aides, home health aides, registered nurses, medical assistants, and nursing assistants—account for almost one-fifth of the net new jobs to be created by 2026. Since it’s difficult to automate (and impossible to offshore) the tactile work of caring for a fragile elderly person, these jobs would seem resistant even to the most aggressive implications of AI and machine automation of the labor force.

It’s the end of retail … as America’s most dependable engine of job growth.

In the second half of the 20th century, American stores replaced factories as the most important place for job growth. The retail workforce tripled between 1940 and 2000. Cashiers and retail salesperson are two of the most common jobs in the country. But in the last few years, as online retail has grown, retail has taken a beating, with one department store after another declaring bankruptcy.

The BLS projects that retail’s heyday is over. They make the rather astonishing projection that as e-commerce grows and automated check-out machines proliferate, the number of cashiers will actually decline slightly in the next 10 years, by about 30,000 jobs. That's not catastrophic—a 0.8 percent drop—but it's an indication of how the economists think about the effects of technology and shifting consumer tastes. The cashier, following the path trod by the manufacturing worker, is in structural decline.

In some cases, I think the retail projections aren’t pessimistic enough. For example, the economists project that jobs at clothing stores and department stores will shrink by about 150,000 in the next ten years. Okay, that’s pretty steep. But the economy has already shed 120,000 of those jobs in just the last two years.

Some of these jobs will shift to warehouses to fulfill online orders. But not all, says Frankie Velez, an economist at the BLS. “A lot of technology is already in fulfillment centers to move and sort goods without human assistance,” he said. Even though these jobs have been a bright spot in the last few years, the BLS projects that warehousing employment won’t grow much faster than the rest of the labor market in the next decade.

Inequality—by income, education, and geography—will continue to grow.

Today, rich, college-educated Americans living in or near the largest cities are thriving. Poorer, less educated Americans living in rural areas are falling further behind. Meanwhile the middle class, once composed of non-college-educated men working in manufacturing and construction, is being hollowed out by globalization and technology.

The next 10 years may exacerbate inequality by earnings and geography. Jobs for people with bachelor’s degrees are projected to grow twice as fast as jobs for people with just high school degrees.

Kolko/BLS

Meanwhile, there won’t be a shortage of either extremely low-paid work or highly paid work. But jobs earning between $30,000 and $50,000 are projected to grow slowly, as employment flags in manufacturing and retail.

BLS

The jobs of the next decade will also be polarized by geography, the economist Jed Kolko said in his analysis of the BLS figures. Jobs in big cities and their suburbs are projected to grow faster than in rural areas. Meanwhile, in the swath of land stretching from the Mississippi River to the Blue Ridge Mountains, from the tip of Michigan to the Louisiana bayou, a large share of Americans are working in occupations that are projected to shrink, many of them in manufacturing. These are areas that tended to vote for Trump in the lection.

Automation will take a nibble, not a bite, out of the economy.

Self-driving cars might be the talk of Silicon Valley and auto manufacturers. But the BLS doesn’t see their impact in the labor market until after 2026. In their projections, heavy truck-driving will add 114,000 new jobs in the next decade, growing at nearly the same rate as the economy. Delivery service drivers are projected to grow even faster the labor force.

Why don’t these economists think that autonomous vehicles are set to replace truck drivers? “We thought that autonomous truck driving would be a little farther out in our projections,” said Teri Morisi, branch chief of the Division of Occupational Employment Projections. “Technological advancements like platooning and braking assistance will make truck driving safer and more energy efficient, but they shouldn’t change the demand for truck driving.”

* * *

This raises a larger question: Is the government any good at predicting the future? The BLS’s early-century forecasts of the next decade didn’t anticipate the Great Recession, which restrained overall job growth and decimated construction, or the natural gas revolution, which created a mining boom. On the other hand, it nailed the growth of education and health care within a percentage point.

Vinick/BLS

The big takeaway? The BLS is good at combining publicly available information and mainstream economic thought to project the growth of the labor force and the government, on which much of education and health care work depends. But very few organizations can reliably predict surprising events.

Economic and technological shocks are inherently unpredictable. To take this report as gospel requires one to believe that the next decade will be significantly less surprising (and, perhaps, significantly more boring) than the last one. One can pray.

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The Secrets of Google’s Moonshot Factory

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 15:00:00 -0400

A snake-robot designer, a balloon scientist, a liquid-crystals technologist, an extradimensional physicist, a psychology geek, an electronic-materials wrangler, and a journalist walk into a room. The journalist turns to the assembled crowd and asks: Should we build houses on the ocean?

The setting is X, the so-called moonshot factory at Alphabet, the parent company of Google. And the scene is not the beginning of some elaborate joke. The people in this room have a particular talent: They dream up far-out answers to crucial problems. The dearth of housing in crowded and productive coastal cities is a crucial problem. Oceanic residences are, well, far-out. At the group’s invitation, I was proposing my own moonshot idea, despite deep fear that the group would mock it.

Like a think-tank panel with the instincts of an improv troupe, the group sprang into an interrogative frenzy. “What are the specific economic benefits of increasing housing supply?” the liquid-crystals guy asked. “Isn’t the real problem that transportation infrastructure is so expensive?” the balloon scientist said. “How sure are we that living in densely built cities makes us happier?” the extradimensional physicist wondered. Over the course of an hour, the conversation turned to the ergonomics of Tokyo’s high-speed trains and then to Americans’ cultural preference for suburbs. Members of the team discussed commonsense solutions to urban density, such as more money for transit, and eccentric ideas, such as acoustic technology to make apartments soundproof and self-driving housing units that could park on top of one another in a city center. At one point, teleportation enjoyed a brief hearing.

X is perhaps the only enterprise on the planet where regular investigation into the absurd is not just permitted but encouraged, and even required. X has quietly looked into space elevators and cold fusion. It has tried, and abandoned, projects to design hoverboards with magnetic levitation and to make affordable fuel from seawater. It has tried—and succeeded, in varying measures—to build self-driving cars, make drones that deliver aerodynamic packages, and design contact lenses that measure glucose levels in a diabetic person’s tears.

These ideas might sound too random to contain a unifying principle. But they do. Each X idea adheres to a simple three-part formula. First, it must address a huge problem; second, it must propose a radical solution; third, it must employ a relatively feasible technology. In other words, any idea can be a moonshot—unless it’s frivolous, small-bore, or impossible.

The purpose of X is not to solve Google’s problems; thousands of people are already doing that. Nor is its mission philanthropic. Instead X exists, ultimately, to create world-changing companies that could eventually become the next Google. The enterprise considers more than 100 ideas each year, in areas ranging from clean energy to artificial intelligence. But only a tiny percentage become “projects,” with full-time staff working on them. It’s too soon to know whether many (or any) of these shots will reach the moon: X was formed in 2010, and its projects take years; critics note a shortage of revenue to date. But several projects—most notably Waymo, its self-driving-car company, recently valued at $70 billion by one Wall Street firm—look like they may.

X is extremely secretive. The company won’t share its budget or staff numbers with investors, and it’s typically off-limits to journalists as well. But this summer, the organization let me spend several days talking with more than a dozen of its scientists, engineers, and thinkers. I asked to propose my own absurd idea in order to better understand the creative philosophy that undergirds its approach. That is how I wound up in a room debating a physicist and a roboticist about apartments floating off the coast of San Francisco.

I’d expected the team at X to sketch some floating houses on a whiteboard, or discuss ways to connect an ocean suburb to a city center, or just inform me that the idea was terrible. I was wrong. The table never once mentioned the words floating or ocean. My pitch merely inspired an inquiry into the purpose of housing and the shortfalls of U.S. infrastructure. It was my first lesson in radical creativity. Moonshots don’t begin with brainstorming clever answers. They start with the hard work of finding the right questions.

Read the rest of the story on The Atlantic.

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The Post-Human World

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 14:00:00 -0500

Famine, plague and war. These have been the three scourges of human history. But today, people in most countries are more likely to die from eating too much rather than too little, more likely to die of old age than a great plague, and more likely to commit suicide than to die in war.

With famine, plague and war in their twilight—at least, for now—mankind will turn its focus to achieving immortality and permanent happiness, according to Yuval Harari’s new book "Homo Deus." In other words, to turning ourselves into gods.

Harari’s previous work, "Sapiens," was a swashbuckling history of the human species. His new book is another mind-altering adventure, blending philosophy, history, psychology and futurism. We spoke recently about its most audacious predictions. This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.

Derek Thompson: In "Homo Deus," you predict the end of work, the end of liberal individualism and the end of humanity. Let’s take these one by one.

First, work. You have a smart and scary way of looking at the political implications of mass automation. At the end of the 19th century, France, Germany and Japan offered free health care to their citizens. Their aim was not strictly to make people happy, but to strengthen their army and industrial potential. In other words, welfare was necessary because people were necessary. But you ask the scary question: What happens to welfare in a future where government no longer needs people?

Yuval Harari: It’s a very scary scenario. It’s not science fiction. It’s already happening.

The reason to build all these mass social service systems was to support strong armies and strong economies. Already the most advanced armies don’t need [as many] people. The same might happen in the civilian economy. The problem is motivation: What if the government loses the motivation to help the masses?

In Scandinavia, the tradition of the welfare state is so entrenched that perhaps they’ll continue to provide welfare even for masses of useless people. But what about Nigeria, South Africa and China? They have been encouraged to provide services mostly in the hope of advancing prosperity, [which requires] having a large basis of healthy and smart citizens. But take that away and you might be left with countries with elites who don’t care about the population.

Thompson: The last point is interesting, because, in Europe and the United States, the opposite seems more true: The population doesn’t care about, or think it needs, the elite. That’s a part of how we got Trump and Brexit. Now, you see these radical-right backlashes against the establishment sweeping across Europe. Why is this happening now?

Harari: That’s the big question. I didn’t foresee it coming. It’s not my expertise to look at the political situation in the U.S. or in Europe. But if you look at the objective condition of health and so forth, most people in the U.S. and Western Europe have better conditions than they used to. But they feel like they are being pushed aside and losing power. And they fear their children will have a worse life than they do today. I think these fears may be justified. But I don’t think the antidote will work. Trump will not help Alabama voters regain their power.

Thompson: Americans might be richer and better educated than they used to be a generation ago, with better health care and superior entertainment options. But the fact of progress doesn’t seem to matter. The story is all that matters. And the victorious Trump story was that America’s cities were falling apart and “I alone can fix it.”

Harari: [White Americans without a college degree] are a declining class within a declining power. The U.S. is losing power compared to the rest of the world, and within the U.S., the Trump voters are losing their status. Even though they are experiencing better conditions, the narrative self which is dominant in most people tells a story of decline, which says that the future will be worse than the present. And most people’s happiness depends on their expectations, not their conditions.

Thompson: Let’s say the future for most people is a universal basic income, wonderful psychedelic drugs and virtual reality video games. People don’t starve. They aren’t miserable. But they also stop striving. The Walt Disney virtues—challenge yourself! go on an adventure!—are sacrificed to live permanently inside of Disney-style entertainment. Is that utopia or dystopia?

Harari: Most philosophers will say that your hypothetical is a dystopia. A far worse world.

But you could argue that people already spend most of their lives in virtual games. Most religions are virtual games superimposed on the reality of life. Do this, and there’s a penalty. Do that, and you get extra points. There is nothing in reality that corresponds to these rules. But you have millions of people playing these virtual reality games. So what is the difference between a religion and a virtual reality game?

Recently, I went with my nephew to hunt Pokémon. We were walking down the street and a bunch of kids approached us. They were also hunting Pokémon. My nephew and these children got into a bit of a fight because they were trying to capture the same invisible creatures. It seemed strange to me. But these Pokémon were very real to the children.

And then, it hit me: This is just like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict! You have two sides fighting over something that I cannot see. I look at the stones of buildings in Jerusalem and I just see stones. But Christians, Jews and Muslims who look at the same stones see a holy city. It’s their imagination, but they are willing to kill for it. That’s virtual reality, too.

Your hypothetical also raises a deep philosophical question: What is the meaning of life? Historically philosophers investigated questions that were interesting to only half a percentage of humankind.

Thompson: Right. “What is ideal way to seek happiness?” isn’t a useful inquiry when the entire countryside is dying of plague.

Harari: Yes, but once you are free from considerations of famine and plague, this becomes a much more practical question: What is the meaning of life? If you design a self-driving car, you must design ethical algorithms in the case that it’s about to hit a child. Do you risk injury to the pedestrian, or the passenger? That is suddenly a very practical question. Philosophy, once an archaic system, becomes central once we take care of widespread death and misery.

Thompson: Alright, let’s move from the end of work to the end of individualism.

You have a beautiful way of summarizing human beings’ relationship with authority. First, we believed that authority came from the gods. But that belief has yielded to modern liberalism, which tells us that authority comes from individuals. Democracy says power comes from the voters, not the divine. Capitalism says the consumer is always right, not the Bible. Marketers say beauty resides in the eye of the beholder, not in platonic forms.

But you have a ominous prediction that humans will merge with the computers, algorithms, and biochemical devices that make our lives better. We will yield our authority and identity to data and artificial intelligence. What invention or innovation in the world right now is the best example of this future?

Harari: I like to begin with the simple things. Look at GPS applications, like Waze and Google Maps. Five years ago, you went somewhere in your car or on foot. You navigated based on your own knowledge and intuition. But today everybody is blindly following what Waze is telling them. They’ve lost the basic ability to navigate by themselves. If something happens to the application, they are completely lost.

That’s not the most important example. But it is the direction we’re talking about. You reach a juncture on the road, and you trust the algorithm. Maybe the junction is your career. Maybe it’s the decision to get married. But you trust the algorithm rather than your own intuition.

The most important invention that’s spreading now is biometric sensors. They may become ubiquitous. Humans will consult their biometric data to determine how to live. That is really interesting and scary stuff, because we will no longer be in charge of our identity. We will outsource our executive decisions to biometric readings of our neurochemical signals to decide how to live.

Thompson: Here is how I understand this idea. It’s the future, and I’m hungry on a Friday night. I think, “I’d like fried chicken.” Then I consult my AI daemon, which can read by biochemical signals and predict my future emotions, and it says to me: “Actually, Derek, a chicken salad will make you happier.” So I eat salad.

On a case-by-case basis, this technology seems wonderful. It’s making me so much healthier and happier. Technology is rescuing me from the natural errors of misreading my future wants and needs. But over time, “I” have disappeared, because I have outsourced my identity to a biochemical analyst.

Harari: Yes, exactly.

In this scenario, we will come to see that decisions don’t come from a mystical soul but from biological processes in the brain. In the past we couldn’t gather the data and analyze it. So you could imagine that there is a mystical, transcendental soul inside you making these decisions. From a practical perspective that was a good enough estimation. But once you combine a better understanding of the biochemical processes in the body with the computational power of big data, then you have a real revolution, because this traditional notion of free will no longer make practical sense and you can have algorithm that make better decisions than an individual human.

Thompson: That’s fascinating, because I now think of these algorithms as bringing me closer to myself. If a fitness tracker encourages me to run more, or an entertainment algorithm discovers a song I love, I’m happier. And I prefer myself happy.

But over time, my decisions have been reduced to brain signals and brain signal readers. “I” am not special, or sacred, or even individual. I’m just a vessel for a bunch of signals that are best read by a computer. There is no room for “me” in that arrangement.

Harari: What really happens is that the self disintegrates. It’s not that you understand your true self better, but you come to realize there is no true self. There is just a complicated connection of biochemical connections, without a core. There is no authentic voice that lives inside you.

Have you seen "Inside Out"? For me, this was the tipping point in popular culture’s understanding of the mind. For decades Disney sold us the liberal individualistic fantasy: Don’t listen to your neighbors or government, just follow your own heart. But then in "Inside Out," you go inside this little girl Riley, and you don’t encounter a self or a core identity. What the movie shows to children and their parents is that Riley is a robot being manipulated by chemical processes inside her brain. The cataclysmic point in the story is your realize that none of the sources inside her are her true self. In the beginning, you identify with Joy, but the critical moment comes when you realize none of these emotions are Riley’s true self. It’s a balance between different sources.

And I think this is what will happen more and more on a general level. The very idea of an individual that exists, which has been so precious to us, is in danger.

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When Will Robots Take All the Jobs?

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 09:00:00 -0400

There is a contradiction in economic forecasting today I’ve come to think of as the “robot paradox.” Some people seem confident automation will take many workers’ jobs, yet they cannot point to evidence technology has done anything in the last few years to replace work or add to productivity.

Indeed, economic growth has been lackluster for the last few years, productivity growth is mysteriously moribund, and the last two years have been perhaps the best time this century for wage growth. This is not what the end of work looks like.

Because I have written repeatedly that policymakers should take the threat of automation seriously, I’ve developed several theories about the robot paradox. The first begins with humility: Maybe I’m wrong, and today’s statistics are evidence machines will continue to supplement workers, as they have mostly done for the last few centuries, rather than erode overall employment.

The second is that I’m right, just not yet: The economy is on the precipice of several wrenching changes—self-driving cars, machine-learning and the continued digitization of shopping—that will replace hundreds of thousands of jobs in a future so near, it is practically the edge of the present.

But the third theory is the most important, the most empirical, and yet the most overlooked. It is that the time to look for technological displacement of workers is not during recoveries, but rather during recessions. There is nothing to see now, but after the next downturn (or the recession after that), there will be.

Consider manufacturing, where employment has fallen by almost 40 percent, or 6 million jobs, since the 1960s. Most people don’t realize in most years since 1970, manufacturing employment has been relatively steady or increased. Between 1969 and 2015, manufacturing employment grew by 4 million during recoveries. But factory jobs fell by 10 million during recessions. In short, the U.S. economy has been in a recession for less than 15 percent of the time between 1970 and 2015, but these periods accounted for 167 percent of the decline in manufacturing jobs.

In my cover story last year on technology and the future of work, I spoke with Henry Siu, an economist from the University of British Columbia, who researched the relationship between worker-replacing technologically and recessions. Sometimes, technology acts like secret agent embedded with employees, working alongside them for years before suddenly turning on them and replacing many jobs in a fell swoop.

“The personal computer existed in the ’80s,” he said, “but you don’t see any effect on office and administrative-support jobs until the 1990s, and then suddenly, in the last recession, it’s huge. So today, you’ve got checkout screens and the promise of driverless cars, flying drones and little warehouse robots. We know that these tasks can be done by machines rather than people. But we may not see the effect until the next recession, or the recession after that.”

For years, this theory has been more of an observation than an empirical finding. But a new study by the economists Brad Hershbein, of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, and Lisa B. Kahn, at the Yale University School of Management, finds supporting evidence in job vacancy postings.

In areas that suffered steep downturns in 2007 and 2008, they found significant evidence of “up-skilling” in job postings. That is, firms were more likely to demand college experience and computer expertise for jobs that used to be low-skilled. After ruling out some other explanations, they conclude these job postings were a reflection of the fact that the recession accelerated the adoption of computer technology.

In other words, the Great Recession replaced workers with technology and required new hires have computer expertise to work with their new “colleagues,” who were now computers. Their paper provides “the first direct evidence that the Great Recession accelerated routine-biased technological change.”

Nobody can be certain of technological shifts many years in the future. But in the event robots will take many people’s jobs is important, the timing is as important as the event itself. If the shifts were gradual, policy-makers would have more time to debate and write laws and workers would have more time to learn new skills. But automation is not a gradually applied force. Instead, labor-replacing automation seems to operate like the famous description of bankruptcy—slowly, slowly and then all at once.

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Why Facebook Scares the Media -- And the US Government

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Tue, 10 May 2016 17:53:49 -0400

In an April 27 conference call to discuss Facebook's extraordinary first-quarter results this year, Mark Zuckerberg announced a high point in his company’s history. Advertising revenue grew by more than 50 percent since 2015, the company was hard at work on a future for artificial intelligence and virtual reality, and the average Facebook user is spending 50 minutes per day on Facebook and its other products, Instagram and Messenger.

That means that each day, more than a billion people—more than 170 million of them in the U.S. and Canada, alone—spend an hour with one company. James Stewart, the New York Times columnist, noted that this is “more time than people spend reading (19 minutes); participating in sports or exercise (17 minutes); or social events (4 minutes)." In short, Facebook is so dominant, it’s almost scary.

Two weeks later, on Monday, several former Facebook news “curators” who edited the Trending section beside the News Feed told Gizmodo that they were asked to suppress stories about Republicans and withhold news from predominantly conservative websites, like RedState.com.

Twitter lit up with outrage, sadness and I-saw-this-coming gloats. Several people, many of them journalists, saw their fears of Facebook’s influence validated.

“Politics is downstream from culture, which is downstream from Mark Zuckerberg,” Ross Douthat wrote. In short, Facebook is so dominant that people are scared.

These two stories about Facebook—the extraordinary earnings and the unfortunate accusations—are part of a larger narrative. Facebook so dominates the market for mobile attention that it is projected to command almost 30 percent of total display advertising revenue in the world this year. (With Google and Alibaba, the top three display ad companies control half of the global market.)

This is mastery that borders on monopoly, and it is for precisely this reason that Facebook is both revered on Wall Street and feared among publishers, whose business is more fragile each year. Even before Facebook’s takeoff, newspaper advertising revenue had fallen by 70 percent between 2000 and 2014.

Facebook is a media company, but more than that, it is a utility, an integral piece of information infrastructure upon which hundreds of publishers and media companies rely to reach their audience. A television channel like MSNBC can directly criticize Republicans all it wants and nobody really cares. But Facebook was roundly criticized for allegedly suppressing conservative news stories, because Facebook is not like a television channel. It is like something we’ve never really seen before: a super-powered cable operator for the mobile future.

Consider Facebook’s 50 minutes in its historical context. Several years ago, McKinsey published an estimate of time spent consuming messages since the start of the 20th century—a historical mountain of media. In 1900, messages came through just a few channels. People read pulp—books and newspapers—but most communication was face-to-face.

In the next century, households fell in love with the radio set, the television set, their desktops and their mobile phones. To appreciate Facebook’s potential (and the controversy of its historic promise), it helps to see it not as a media channel like WNYC or NBC, but rather as an entire technology platform, like radio or television, which distributes many media channels.

Radio, which entered 50 percent of households by the early 1930s, initially competed most obviously with print to distribute news and stories. But perhaps its most significant cultural role was to distribute something else entirely: popular music.

When television became the most popular consumer technology product in history in the 1950s, it adopted the stars and the style of radio. (Television was so much “the new radio” that it even replaced radio sets in the corner of living rooms, a perfect one-to-one hardware swap.)

But TV's most important cultural revolution in the second half of the century wasn’t to replace the radio, but rather to replace film as the world's chief visual medium. Between 1950 and 2000, television became a $100 billion industry, while the number of movie tickets purchased per American fell from about 25 to four.

Radio wasn’t just a local newspaper; it was also a national phonograph. Television wasn’t just radio with pictures; it was also living-room movies. It was difficult to see these analogies at the dawn of the technology, because they were not inevitable, but rather emerged in the chaotic interplay between businesses and consumers.

Zuckerberg's growing empire of digital attention represents a more profound shift than either radio or television. Returning to the 20th century, one could roughly divide each communications technology into two categories: social and broadcast. Talking was social; radio was broadcast. Telephones were social; television was broadcast.

These categories were leaky—people listened to the radio as families, and danced to rock-and-roll with friends in high school gyms—but never entirely overlapping.

Facebook is a departure from 20-century technologies, because it is both a social media and a broadcast platform. It is a modern telephone network and television, a global mail system and a global newspaper.

With more than 100 million hours of daily video watch time, millions of dollars for media companies to make live video, and even a new morning show, Facebook’s closest analogue isn’t one channel, but rather Comcast: a massive media-distribution company with an enormous share of its market.

The Comcast metaphor is not perfect—a cable provider charges subscriptions for infrastructure; a social media company charges ads for arbitraging user attention—but it’s apt for understanding the culture of skepticism toward Facebook among the media.

Comcast is legally obligated to promote information from many sources, including local stations. Fox News can say basically whatever it wants about the president, but Comcast can’t conspire against ABC to promote the same agenda, because it cannot operate an explicitly partisan platform on public airwaves. (Just this afternoon, Sen. John Thune and the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee launched an inquiry into Facebook's news practices. The Senate’s jurisdiction here is highly questionable, but its eagerness to take on Facebook for allegedly suppressing conservative news suggests that even Washington equates Facebook’s scope with a cable provider.)

Facebook’s algorithm already funnels conservative news to conservative users by design. But this is a reflection of user preferences and a part of Facebook’s creed to give people what they want. It’s not a centralized decision by the most powerful media disseminator in the world to punish some users for having opinions about taxes and social justice that Menlo Park doesn’t share.

The reason to address these questions now is that Facebook’s influence on media might not yet have peaked. If a company can connect every person in the world around any visual and auditory event, past and live, then there isn’t any existing media platform that it cannot distribute. Text, sounds and moving images—both socially shared between individuals (SMS, phone calls, mail) and broadcast or distributed from media companies (news, books, radio, music, television, film and video games)—comprise the entire history of media. That means Facebook’s potential encompasses the whole McKinsey mountain of media.

There’s too much competition in mobile attention for Facebook (or whatever competitor replaces it) to be the whole mountain. But the foreseeable future of digital media—both measured by attention and by ad dollars—belongs to Facebook.

When a digital media network has 1 billion people connected to entertainment companies, news publications, brands and each other, the right historical analogy isn’t television, or telephones, or radio, or newspapers. The right historical analogy doesn’t exist. Facebook’s power is unprecedented. It shouldn’t be surprised if its scrutiny is similarly historic.

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The Joys and Sorrows of Late-Night Email

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Mon, 18 Aug 2014 10:29:51 -0400

At 10:13 PM last night, I sent Atlantic assistant editor Joe Pinsker an email to say I was writing an article about all the after-work time we spend on email.

Before the clock struck 10:14, Joe had replied: "Sounds good."

Without having any idea that I would share his correspondence, Joe anticipated that I needed an anecdotal lede, and he kindly provided it. For a certain class of workers, late evening isn't time off work. It's time on email, time to show your addressees the true meaning of workaholic , and time to return to a job from which you can never truly sign out.

The specter of endless email doesn't haunt all workers equally. The most common jobs in America, like cashiers, retail salespeople, and food and service workers, don't need to be email-intensive. They often work within a stable flow of customers and do routine-heavy work for clients whose needs don't change dramatically from day to day.

But in other white-collar industries—law, consulting, advertising, fashion, media, non-profits, fundraising, politics—individual workers are constantly working with new clients and partners, whose needs require constant contacting , pinging , base-touching, out-reaching, and so on. Email isn't just for your cross-country clients; it's just as likely to be for your cross-desk colleagues. The upshot is a ceaseless flow of correspondences that often bleeds over into dusk. Email consumes an average of 13 hours per week, according to a McKinsey Global Institute paper , or 28 percent of the average workweek. With the typical "knowledge" worker—that is: somebody whose professional output is creative—earning $75,000 a year, that means "the time spent on reading and answering email costs a company $20,990 per worker per year." (No wonder there are all 15 people trying to reform it .)

Put another way, for every ten minutes we spend on "role-specific tasks" outside of our inbox, we spend roughly seven minutes on email.

For Every Hour of Work, 17 Minutes of Email

McKinsey

Is this a good thing, a bad thing, or just a ... thing? Brad Stone, a reporter who shares my affection for late-night emailing, calls the nocturnal allure of our inbox "the new night shift." In Bloomberg Businessweek, he writes :

The irony of the new night shift is that white-collar professionals have never had more flexibility and autonomy. Companies regularly bend over backward to appear family-friendly and allow working moms and dads to leave the office early to get the kids. The young and childless, meanwhile, continue working, creating a guilt that forces parents to log back on after dinner.

“It really is a global economy," says David Mars, a New York venture capitalist. But if the pressures of globalization and a flimsy economy have endangered the set-hour workweek, mobile technology has obliterated it. In an unpublished Harvard Business School survey that I reviewed last year , American managers and workers reported that they were "on"—either working or "monitoring" work while being accessible—almost 90 hours a week. With this new denominator, email isn't 28 percent of a 45-hour workweek. It's 14 percent of a workweek that begins when our heads lift off the pillow and ends when we fall, face-first and exhausted, back into it. Wake-up-to-power-down is the new 9-to-5.

Atlantic

Separate from the pressures of a global economy, the impulse to log on at night seems, to me, purely domestic. I'm the one telling myself that the work is going to be there in the morning, so why not start whittling it down tonight? There's also the social signal sent by a late-night email. After a certain hour, I'm not just sending a message; I'm also sending a message . Responding to somebody 24 hours late suggests a lack of diligence. Responding to that person around midnight takes the same amount of procrastination, but disguises it as industriousness: " Oh, hey, see that 1:04 AM timestamp? I guess I'm just that busy! (yet dedicated!)."

The culprit for my late-night email addiction isn't the addresses in the "To:" and "From:" fields. It's the name in my signature. We are doing this to ourselves.

( Image via kpatyhka / Shutterstock.com )

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Mobile Is Eating Global Attention: 10 Graphs on the State of the Internet

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Thu, 29 May 2014 12:41:11 -0400

Mary Meeker's State of the Internet presentation is a primordial soup for fledgling think pieces about the Future of Digital, and I mean that in a good way, actually. It's a 164-page slideshow of graphs and big-think proclamations about where our attention—and money chasing our attention—is going.

Here are my favorite charts, with some commentary.

The mother of all attention charts

This is your at-a-glance picture of how America spends her time consuming media, and how ad dollars are divided across the major categories of print, radio, TV, Internet, and mobile. Feast your eyes...

Here are three conclusions you could draw from this graph:

1. TV Still Rules. Compare this attention chart with its 2011 version below and you see something strange: TV's share of our attention has slightly declined, while its share of the American ad market has slightly increased . It's the only category that shares that dubious, dual distinction. Essentially: Advertisers like moving pictures on big screens even more than we do.

2. Print Is Simply Screwed. Over time, you could argue, ad dollars and attention tend to align, because companies simply want to be where the ears and eyeballs are. If that's true, print's structural decline is nowhere near over. Its share of attention fell six percentage points in the last two years, and there's still a cavernous gap between reading time and ad sales.

Not all attention is created equal , a good print publisher will tell you, and she's right. If the typical American looks at his phone 150 times a day for 15 seconds, that's about 40 minutes spent on a mobile device. But what's more valuable: 40 minutes divided into infinitesimally tiny slivers on a three-inch screen, or 40 minutes reading an Atlantic cover story in a beautiful print layout? (The latter, obviously. ) But print advertising as a category buys a tiny amount of our attention at a high price. Leading us to the final conclusion...

3. Mobile Is Devouring Attention, but Not Ads (Yet)

Eyes move faster than ads. It was true for TV: In 1941 , when the first television ads appeared with local baseball games, radio and print dominated the media advertising market. Now it's true for mobile, which is practically a glass appendage attached to working Americans and commands more attention than radio and print combined, even though it only commands 1/20th of US ad spending. Google and Facebook own the future of mobile advertising , for now. But the present of mobile monetization isn't ads. It's apps...

Mobile is an app business

The second chart that really struck me from the Meeker report shows the growth of the mobile biz since 2008, which has exploded from $2 billion to $38 billion. I never would have guessed that two-thirds of the mobile business comes from paid apps rather than advertising. It's an interesting reversal from the desktop ecosystem, where just about every Internet property I use is free and supported with third-party advertising. When you combine this graph (basically: Mobile is an app industry, with a side of ads) and the previous graph (basically: The future of attention is mobile), you begin to see just how important it is for media companies to promote high-quality apps for their stuff.

Asia and Africa are the future

If you think mobile is big in America, consider that its share of Internet usage is two times higher in Asia and Africa. There are a lot of countries that simply skipped the laptop generation and went straight to Internet-connected phones. This is one reason why some African countries are much further ahead of the U.S. in mobile payments .

Google and Apple are the future

It's a familiar story, but a powerful one. Eight years ago, Google and Apple didn't have a phone business. Now they make the operating system that powers just about every single phone shipped around the world.

This raises a larger point about Google. Android OS powers about 75 percent of new units shipped. Google's mobile ads account for about half the global market , which is doubling next year. Google powers the world's phones and dominates the market of selling attention within those phones.

Photos are the future

If you're wondering why Facebook spent a bajillion dollars on WhatsApp and Instagram (and offered more bajillions to Snapchat), just look at this graph for a split-second. The Internet as you know is essentially a series of tubes optimized for facilitating the distribution of photos. Although Facebook's share of that photo market isn't growing, WhatsApp and Snapchat have exploded. This feeds into a larger point that Meeker makes in the presentation, which is that the mobile Internet has been a boon for discrete, simple functions. WhatsApp is simple. Snapchat is simple. Timelines are simple. Simple actions and interfaces are thriving on mobile, more than services like Facebook which offer a more complex suite of functions.

Here's another chart showing how mobile accelerated unique visitors at visual sites like Instagram and Pinterest. Three-inch screens are crap for reading, crap for typing, and crap for executing Excel macros. But they're divine for staring at a cascade of easy, pretty photos.

Television is the new fireplace

We don't just sit and stare: 84 percent of us are doing something on our phones and tablets with the TV on.

Television only means "live" if you're older than 30

Millennials (adults under 32) watch 59 percent of their television delayed, on-demand, or online. Everybody else watches 59 percent of their television live.

Americans love-love-love our screens

Americans spent more time in front of the TV than just about any country in the world, except for the UK, and more time in front of all our screens than almost any developed country in the world. Fascinatingly, the countries with the most reported screen time are emerging economies like Indonesia, Brazil, and China, while the U.S. leads all advanced economies in screen time. Of note in this graph:

- British people watch the most TV.
- The Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russians spend the most time on desktop computers.
- Nigeria is the most addicted to their smartphones.
- Nobody loves tablets more than the Philippines and Indonesia.

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Monetizing Social Media Users Is Getting Easier; Adding New Ones Is Getting Harder

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 10:28:57 -0500

The old critique of social media companies like Facebook and Twitter (and Snapchat and WhatsApp) went like this: Adding users is easy, but where's the money? The new concern about social media companies is the opposite: Fine, you're making money, but where are the users?

The big flip began with fears that Facebook was losing traction among teenagers , whose online habits have been highly predictive of digital habits nationwide. Facebook somewhat assuaged those concerns with strong international growth in their last earnings report. But the fears are full-blown when it comes to Twitter, whose earnings report this week delivered an unambiguous message: Monetizing users is getting easier, but adding users is getting harder.

Twitter's U.S. growth has totally flatlined, and the company added just 9 million monthly active users worldwide in the last three months of 2013. Maybe that sounds like a lot of new customers, and it would be for, say, a regional cable company. But for a newly IPO'd international social media phenomenon relying on spectacular future growth to justify its oversized valuation, it's a big disappointment.

And a bigger reversal. Eleven months ago, I wrote a column for The Atlantic summing up analysts' fears that as attention moved to smaller and smaller screens, our eyes were fleeing to places where monetization simply could not follow. How could desktop companies possibly adapt to a world shifting inexorably to phones? I asked. Quite easily, it turns out. Facebook now makes 53% of its ad revenue from mobile. Eleven months after Wall Street wondered if mobile would be Mark Zuckerberg's undoing, Facebook is a mobile-first company. Even better, Twitter's ad haul is 75% mobile.

But the problem isn't the ads. It's the eyeballs. This Quartz graph tells two stories. First, Twitter's measure of attention—timeline views, in purple bars—is down. Second, Twitter's measure of monetization—dollars per thousand views, in blue—is up. We thought mobile attention was worthless and boundless. For Twitter, at least, were wrong about both.

I'll resist making any grand predictions about the future of Twitter, which is still an exceptional product, or Facebook, whose fortunes seem to yo-yo every quarter between doomed and invincible. The larger point seems to be that there was a time that monetizing attention on teeny little phone screens was supposed to be an impossible dream. Instead, just as money followed attention onto radio, TVs and desktops, money is beginning to follow attention onto phones, too. The margins are lower, but at scale, mobile apps aren't just procrastination baubles. They're real businesses.

( Image via Quka / Shutterstock.com )

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What Jobs Will the Robots Take?

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 11:15:59 -0500

It is an invisible force that goes by many names. Computerization. Automation. Artificial intelligence. Technology. Innovation. And, everyone's favorite, ROBOTS .

Whatever name you prefer, some form of it has been stoking progress and killing jobs—from seamstresses to paralegals—for centuries. But this time is different: Nearly half of American jobs today could be automated in "a decade or two," according to a new paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, discussed recently in The Economist . The question is: Which half?

Another way of posing the same question is: Where do machines work better than people? Tractors are more powerful than farmers. Robotic arms are stronger and more tireless than assembly-line workers. But in the past 30 years, software and robots have thrived at replacing a particular kind of occupation: the average-wage, middle-skill, routine-heavy worker, especially in manufacturing and office admin.

Indeed, Frey and Osborne project that the next wave of computer progress will continue to shred human work where it already has: manufacturing, administrative support, retail, and transportation. Most remaining factory jobs are "likely to diminish over the next decades," they write. Cashiers, counter clerks, and telemarketers are similarly endangered. On the far right side of this graph, you can see the industry breakdown of the 47 percent of jobs they consider at "high risk."

And, for the nitty-gritty breakdown, here's a chart of the ten jobs with a 99-percent likelihood of being replaced by machines and software. They are mostly routine-based jobs (telemarketing, sewing) and work that can be solved by smart algorithms (tax preparation, data entry keyers, and insurance underwriters). At the bottom, I've also listed the dozen jobs they consider least likely to be automated. Health care workers, people entrusted with our safety, and management positions dominate the list.

If you wanted to use this graph as a guide to the future of automation, your upshot would be: Machines are better at rules and routines; people are better at directing and diagnosing. But it doesn't have to stay that way.

The Next Big Thing

Predicting the future typically means extrapolating the past. It often fails to anticipate breakthroughs. But it's precisely those unpredictable breakthroughs in computing that could have the biggest impact on the workforce.

For example, imagine somebody in 2004 forecasting the next ten years in mobile technology. In 2004, three years before the introduction of the iPhone, the best-selling mobile device, the Nokia 2600, looked like this:

Many extrapolations of phones from the early 2000s were just "the same thing, but smaller." It hasn't turned out that way at all: Smartphones are hardly phones, and they're bigger than the Nokia 2600. If you think wearable technology or the "Internet of Things" seem kind of stupid today, well, fine. But remember that ten years ago, the future of mobile appeared to be a minuscule cordless landline phone with Tetris, and now smartphones sales are about to overtake computers . Breakthroughs can be fast.

We might be on the edge of a breakthrough moment in robotics and artificial intelligence. Although the past 30 years have hollowed out the middle, high- and low-skill jobs have actually increased, as if protected from the invading armies of robots by their own moats. Higher-skill workers have been protected by a kind of social-intelligence moat. Computers are historically good at executing routines, but they're bad at finding patterns, communicating with people, and making decisions, which is what managers are paid to do. This is why some people think managers are, for the moment, one of the largest categories immune to the rushing wave of AI.

Meanwhile, lower-skill workers have been protected by the Moravec moat. Hans Moravec was a futurist who pointed out that machine technology mimicked a savant infant: Machines could do long math equations instantly and beat anybody in chess, but they can't answer a simple question or walk up a flight of stairs.

But perhaps we've hit an inflection point. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee pointed out in their book Race Against the Machine (and in their new book The Second Machine Age ), robots are finally crossing these moats by moving and thinking like people. Amazon has bought robots to work its warehouses. Narrative Science can write earnings summaries that are indistinguishable from wire reports. We can say to our phones I'm lost, help and our phones can tell us how to get home.

Computers that can drive cars, in particular, were never supposed to happen. Even ten years ago, many engineers said it was impossible. Navigating a crowded street isn't mindlessly routine. It needs a deft combination of spacial awareness, soft focus, and constant anticipation--skills that are quintessentially human. But I don't need to tell you about Google's self-driving cars, because they're one of the most over-covered stories in tech today.

And that's the most remarkable thing: In a decade, the idea of computers driving cars went from impossible to boring .

The Human Half

In the 19th century, new manufacturing technology replaced what was then skilled labor. Somebody writing about the future of innovation then might have said skilled labor is doomed. In the second half of the 20th century, however, software technology took the place of median-salaried office work, which economists like David Autor have called the "hollowing out" of the middle-skilled workforce.

The first wave showed that machines are better at assembling things. The second showed that machines are better at organization things. Now data analytics and self-driving cars suggest they might be better at pattern-recognition and driving. So what are we better at?

If you go back to the two graphs in this piece to locate the safest industries and jobs, they're dominated by managers, health-care workers, and a super-category that encompasses education, media, and community service. One conclusion to draw from this is that humans are, and will always be, superior at working with, and caring for, other humans. In this light, automation doesn't make the world worse. Far from it: It creates new opportunities for human ingenuity.

But robots are already creeping into diagnostics and surgeries . Schools are already experimenting with software that replaces teaching hours. The fact that some industries have been safe from automation for the last three decades doesn't guarantee that they'll be safe for the next one. As Frey and Osborne write in their conclusion:

While computerization has been historically conﬁned to routine tasks involving explicit rule-based activities, algorithms for big data are now rapidly entering domains reliant upon pattern recognition and can readily substitute for labour in a wide range of non-routine cognitive tasks. In addition, advanced robots are gaining enhanced senses and dexterity, allowing them to perform a broader scope of manual tasks. This is likely to change the nature of work across industries and occupations.

It would be anxious enough if we knew exactly which jobs are next in line for automation. The truth is scarier. We don't really have a clue.

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The 9 Ways That Twitter Could Fail, According to Twitter

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 10:14:57 -0400

Twitter has filed for an IPO. This document, called an S-1, is like a cover letter for a young firm trying to impress big institutional investors to buy the stock on Day One (and hold onto it). But in addition to the chest-pumping, every company is obligated to enumerate the risks that could destroy it.

Like the weaknesses part of a cover letter, the risk section is arguably the most interesting part of the S-1. It's where, for example, Facebook famously misled retail investors about its weakening desktop business, before the company had properly built out a mobile business.

Befitting any young, undeveloped, and unprofitable company, Twitter's list of risks is long and wide-ranging, from Maybe we'll stop adding users to Maybe China will ban us forever. Here are the most significant and fascinating risks the company fesses up to (for a full list, go to page 16 of the S-1).

(1) What if Twitter has simply stopped growing? There is some evidence of stagnation. Twitter announced 215 million monthly active users today, meaning "it's added only 15 million since it hit more than 200 million late last year," according to Mike Isaac. Twitter acknowledges that if users top tweeting (or if their tweets are bad and go unread), the company will slowly bleed advertising, as well.

As just one social media/news app in a crowded field, Twitter also acknowledges that its most serious competition has much, much more money, including Facebook (with Instagram), Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo!—and that's just in the U.S. "Facebook operates a social networking site with significantly more users than Twitter and has been introducing features similar to those of Twitter," the company admits.

(2) What if Twitter really never learns how to make serious money? Twitter generates nearly 90 percent of its revenue from advertising and more than half of its revenue from mobile advertising. It has three products -- Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts and Promoted Trends -- but none are quite proven. "If we are unable to demonstrate the value of our Promoted Products to advertisers and advertising agencies," Twitter says, it will suffer from both a stagnating user base and a stagnating monetization strategy.

Twitter is trying to introduce new features it can turn into money-gushers. Vine, the six-second video feature, offers another window to serve native ads. Amplify gives TV advertisers the ability to re-target viewers with Promoted Tweets. The company has also teamed with Nielsen to produce a TV rating system which, while generating no revenue today, suggests a future where Twitter sells its data. Still, these initiatives are too young to celebrate or lambast, just yet.

(3) What if Apple or Google design an operating system that ruins the Twitter experience? Twitter isn't vertically integrated. It works on other people's devices, browsers, and operating systems, like Mac OS, Windows, Android, iOS, Chrome and Firefox. "Any changes in such systems, devices or web browsers that degrade the functionality of our products and services or give preferential treatment to competitive products or services could adversely affect usage of our products and services," the company says.

(4) What if Twitter fails to expand internationally? Twitter needs more users. The trouble is that, in many populous and connected countries, it faces competition and other barriers. Twitter is blocked in China. Some countries have nearly identical or highly similar services, like Sina Weibo in China, LINE in Japan and Kakao in South Korea. In other markets, like Europe, government regulation restricts its freedom to advertise. In less developed countries, like India, poor Internet connections makes Twitter less viable. All this matters because the typical monthly unique overseas is worth 23 percent less than an American user.

(5) What if Twitter never manages to turn a profit, at all? "We may not be able to achieve or subsequently maintain profitability," Twitter acknowledges. Indeed, it's lost about $420 million in its lifespan. Although revenue has grown from practically nothing in 2009 to $317 million last year, the company expects that breakneck pace to slow as the user base slows.

(6) What if Twitter suffers the mother of all Fail Whales? Twitter is massive and mostly smooth even during peak hours. But it's still vulnerable to infrastructure breakdowns. In the company's own words:

We have experienced, and may in the future experience, service disruptions, outages and other performance problems due to a variety of factors, including infrastructure changes, human or software errors, hardware failure, capacity constraints due to an overwhelming number of people accessing our products and services simultaneously, computer viruses and denial of service or fraud or security attacks.

(7) What if foreign governments get in the way? Around the world, governments and regulators are proposing data-protection and privacy laws that could affect Twitter's business. "These laws and regulations are subject to change and uncertain interpretation," which could cost Twitter, not just future users, but also money paid out in penalties and lawsuits.

(8) What if hackers get in the way? Twitter experiences cyber-attacks "on a regular basis." In February 2013, hackers gained access to 250,000 accounts. "Any such breach or unauthorized access could result in significant legal and financial exposure, damage to our reputation and a loss of confidence in the security of our products and services that could have an adverse effect on our business and operating results," Twitter said.

(9) What if Twitter gets in its own way? Throughout its risk section, the company is candid about all the ways it could screw itself: management fails, a short-term focus that compromises long-term vision; a long-term focus on innovation that takes away from quarter-to-quarter revenue growth; or a breach or massive screw-up that loses the trust of marginal users and devastates growth.

(Image via igor kisselev/Shutterstock.com)

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Video: Big Changes Coming to Your Gmail Inbox

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Wed, 29 May 2013 15:48:02 -0400

Gmail announced on its blog this morning a major design overhaul which will be rolling out to inboxes "gradually."

The new inbox is designed around five tabs: primary (for your human-to-human contacts), social (notices from Google+, which you knew they'd work in somehow, YouTube, and Picasa), promotions (retailers), updates (did your flight get changed? has your package shipped?), and forum (for message boards and group discussions). You'll be able to customize which tabs you see, and train the categories to sort the emails as you would like.

The Most Fascinating Charts From an Epic Slideshow of Internet Trends

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Wed, 29 May 2013 14:23:19 -0400

Every year, Mary Meeker and the team from KPCB unleash upon the world the mother of all slideshows, which aims to sum up The State of the Internet. This year's behemoth was born this morning, weighing in at 117 pages. Here are the 12 most interesting pages. Check out the full report here .

(1) America's Media Attention in 1 Graph. Americans spend just six percent of their media diet with print, but those pages attract 23 percent of all ad spending. In mobile, the trend is the polar opposite. I don't know if this is worse news for the print industry (where you'd think ad spending has a long way to fall) or Facebook (since monetizing mobile attention is so devilishly difficult.)

See the other charts on The Atlantic.

( Image via scyther5 / Shutterstock.com )

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Why Is American Health Care So Ridiculously Expensive?

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:03:25 -0400

The U.S. medical system is absurdly expensive. You knew that already. But you probably didn't realize just how absurdly expensive it is compared to other countries.

These 21 graphs (one of them you'll see above) from the International Federation of Health Plans, via Ezra Klein, start to paint the picture. The average routine office visit in the U.S. is three-times more expensive than in Canada. The average CT scan is five-times more expensive than in Canada. And as a share of GDP, our health care costs are an ignominious colossus towering over the rest of the world

In the U.S. health care system, everything costs more. Being in a hospital cost more. Because our drugs cost more (prescription drug prices can be 10X the rate in the UK or Germany). And our doctors cost more (a US family physician makes 3X her German counterpart). Because their education costs more (the education for a German physician's education is nearly free). And on it goes.

Marissa Mayer Is Wrong: Working From Home Can Make You More Productive

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 11:15:28 -0500

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has officially banned the company's employees from working from home. Here's the critical sentence: "To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices." The full memo, originally published by All Things D, is reprinted in full at the bottom of this article.

Collaboration and communication is tricky to quantify (how do you know if your employees are talking more over Gchat/conversations in the office or from home?) But productivity isn't so hard to measure. It's work over time. And some studies have shown that working from home can make certain workers more productive.

The most commonly cited study in the field of home-work and productivity comes from Stanford. The results were clear: Telecommuting is nothing to be afraid of. Workers at a Chinese travel agency took fewer breaks and sick-days, answered more calls every minute, and reported improved work satisfaction when they worked from home. Later, the agency allowed the employees in the experiment to choose if they wanted to work from home, and productivity increased by 22%.