Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Sunday, April 23, 2017
Schadenfreude (from Juicero)
I learnt a new word today. Schadenfreude. It is borrowed from German, it seems. No surprises there, those guys have words for everything. Schadenfreude means pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune. And I read it here, an article about the juicer debacle last week. It’s the story of how somebody raised 120 million to make and sell what was a simple mechanical press, and all it could do was press juice out of packets. I thought these smart investors are hard to impress, apparently they will fall for anything, if its connected to the internet. Check this out:
I feel so Schadenfreude !
Friday, April 21, 2017
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
In the long term, automation will kill more jobs
All the Indian IT companies are now focussing on automation, too much actually. More and more companies are quietly reducing their workforce - especially the lower rung - as many of the processes are getting automated.
For companies, the move is welcome as it saves them cost, while boosting efficiency at the same time. The automation of course has hit entry-level workforce the hardest, but it is not as if senior and middle rung employees are spared either. This is where senior employees take the hit. Many employees post 40 find themselves unemployable and have to be extremely good or equipped with a specific skill set to get a job. Otherwise, companies find it easier to hire three freshers for one tenth of the senior’s salary and willing to work 16 hours a day.
And the worst way countries have found to this problem is basic income. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor.
Alreay, 80% of engineers passing out of Indian colleges are unemployable. And IT has always been the largest absobers of all those graduates. Future engineers , and eveyone by extension, are going to hav to fight robots to keep their jobs. For once I feel mankind took a wrong turn on the ‘disruptive’ road, and future generations are going to pay the price.