A quick repost of an article I just published on Medium.
Many people don’t wear a watch. Here’s why I can’t imagine living without one: Why I’m wearing a watch
Clay Shirky at his best (as usual):
Regarding teaching as a shared struggle changes the nature of the classroom. It’s not me demanding that they focus — its me and them working together to help defend their precious focus against outside distractions. I have a classroom full of riders and elephants, but I’m trying to teach the riders.
He goes on with remarks that are more widely applicable (internal company meetings anyone?):
The structure of a classroom, and especially a seminar room, exhibits the same tension. All present have an incentive for the class to be as engaging as possible; even though engagement often means waiting to speak while listening to other people wrestle with half-formed thoughts, that’s the process by which people get good at managing the clash of ideas. Against that long-term value, however, each member has an incentive to opt out, even if only momentarily. The smallest loss of focus can snowball, the impulse to check WeChat quickly and then put the phone away leading to just one message that needs a reply right now, and then, wait, what happened last night??? (To the people who say “Students have always passed notes in class”, I reply that old-model notes didn’t contain video and couldn’t arrive from anywhere in the world at 10 megabits a second.)
Based on personal experience, I don't really understand why teachers allowed us to use our laptops during class. The amount of students using them to do anything but listening to the class was just overwhelming, especially once wireless connexions became widely available.
Steven Sinofsky published this back in April:
I chose to focus on what I think is the most challenging aspect of being a PM, which is achieving clarity and maintaining a point of view for a product when all forces work against this very thing. What customers value most in a product is that “it just work” or “does what it is supposed to do,” and yet at every step in a product, the dynamics of design work to make this the most difficult to achieve.
He goes on to list 5 lessons life taught him about product management. Two of them really resonated with me:
Shipping is a feature. Every PM knows this but it is also the hardest thing to get right. As a PM you throw around things like “the enemy of the good is the perfect” or, well, “shipping is a feature” all the time, yet we all have a hard time getting a product out the door. There’s always more to do to get it right.
This one sounds so obvious that it feels almost useless to say. Yet I've seen more than once great features get pushed further down the timeline again and again because it just wasn't ready yet. Humans are prone to the planning fallacy: underestimating how long it will take to get things done. Working against it is a full-time job!
You get paid to decide. Some people love making decisions on their own. Other people need socialization and iteration to make a choice. Either way can work (or not) as a product manager, but to be great you really do have to decide. Deciding anything important or meaningful at all means some people will disagree. Some might really disagree a huge amount. The bottom line is a decision has to be made.
This last one is especially difficult in the context of building a truly open source product, where every committer has an equal voice in the outcome of the product. Sometimes two visions are just not going to align exactly and a choice has to be made. Having a final decider helps a lot.
The whole piece is great - go read it!
Paul Adams over at Intercom has a great article about the design process of an useful product:
Once you have a clear mission, vision and product architecture, you can start to think about the other details. The goals people have, what makes them happy, fulfilled, successful. The jobs your product does for them, where it works well, where it doesn’t.
He points out the need to implement design around jobs-to-be-done:
One feels almost forced to match this with the well-known Steve Jobs quote:At Intercom, we’re working with Clay Christensen’s Jobs framework for product design. We frame every design problem in a Job, focusing on the triggering event or situation, the motivation and goal, and the intended outcome:
When _____ , I want to _____ , so I can _____ .
For example: When an important new customer signs up, I want to be notified, so I can start a conversation with them.
This gives us clarity. We can map this Job to the mission and prioritise it appropriately. It ensures that we are constantly thinking about all four layers of design. We can see what components in our system are part of this Job and the necessary relationships and interactions required to facilitate it. We can design from the top down, moving through outcome, system, interactions, before getting to visual design.
''Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,'' says Steve Jobs, Apple's C.E.O. ''People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.''
So I watched the "Humans Need Not Apply" video earlier today:
It brought to mind an article by Marc Andreessen I had read some time ago:
One of the most interesting topics in modern times is the “robots eat all the jobs” thesis. It boils down to this: Computers can increasingly substitute for human labor, thus displacing jobs and creating unemployment. Your job, and every job, goes to a machine.
This sort of thinking is textbook Luddism, relying on a “lump-of-labor” fallacy – the idea that there is a fixed amount of work to be done. The counterargument to a finite supply of work comes from economist Milton Friedman — Human wants and needs are infinite, which means there is always more to do. I would argue that 200 years of recent history confirms Friedman’s point of view.
Marc's article offers a perfect counterpoint to the video. A couple points from the video seem to contradict Marc's take though. Marc states that "just as most of us today have jobs that weren’t even invented 100 years ago, the same will be true 100 years from now."
CGP Grey's counterargument is that:
Here is one final point to consider. The US census in 1776 tracked only a few kinds of jobs. Now there are hundreds of kinds of jobs, but the new ones are not a significant part of the labor force. [...]Going down the list all this work existed in some form a hundred years ago and almost all of them are targets for automation. Only when we get to number 33 on the list is there finally something new. [...]
This list above is 45% of the workforce. Just what we've talked about today, the stuff that already works, can push us over that number pretty soon. And given that even our modern technological wonderland new kinds of work are not a significant portion of the economy, this is a big problem.Both of them identify the same outcome:
This video isn't about how automation is bad -- rather that automation is inevitable. It's a tool to produce abundance for little effort. We need to start thinking now about what to do when large sections of the population are unemployable -- through no fault of their own. What to do in a future where, for most jobs, humans need not apply.
But do not reach the same conclusions:
Reading this actually reminded me of the descriptions of Athenian Democracy. A society of peers discussing the fate of their cities, sustained by the work of slaves. The description of a society where all of the grunt work is done by robots, leaving humans to pursue their higher aspirations (arts, culture, politics...) looks pretty close to that ideal.Thought experiment: Imagine a world in which all material needs are provided for free, by robots and material synthesizers.
Housing, energy, health care, food, and transportation – they’re all delivered to everyone for free by machines. Zero jobs in those fields remain.
Stick with me here. What would be the key characteristics of that world, and what would it be like to live in it? For starters, it’s a consumer utopia. Everyone enjoys a standard of living that kings and popes could have only dreamed of.
Since our basic needs are taken care of, all human time, labor, energy, ambition, and goals reorient to the intangibles: the big questions, the deep needs. Human nature expresses itself fully, for the first time in history. Without physical need constraints, we will be whoever we want to be.
The main fields of human endeavor will be culture, arts, sciences, creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, and adventure.
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt argues two points that directly mesh with this topic:
Labor is one of the three fundamental forms of activity that form the vita activa. It is repetitive, never-ending and only includes the activities that are necessary to the sustenance of life, such as the production of food and shelter as well as physical reproduction, with nothing beyond that. [...] The products of Labor is thus consumed as soon as it is produced without leaving any lasting trace behind. [...]The third activity, that of great deeds and great words, is specifically political and properly construed can only take place in the public realm potentially leading to the only form of immortality properly accepted in ancient Greece, that of creating something lasting within the world. [...]
Other actions exist of course, such as bartering goods in a market, that do not require such a unique declaration. These however are products of the subject's necessity (ex. obtain food to survive) and not some unique individuality which is properly his. In this sense, worker's equality is almost a tautology, since it equates people through the basic human condition of need, while citizen's equality is by definition equality of unequals that are trying to create a common world.
As pointed out by Marc, human aspirations would not disappear nor significantly change:
I’m talking about democratic capitalism to the nth degree. Nor am I postulating the end of money or competition or status seeking or will to power, rather the full extrapolation of each of those.
Thanks to robots, humans would be free to truly live their lives as political animals. The repartition of wealth and income would probably remain a tough and disputed question. New ways to split the fruits of economic growth might need to be invented. A basic income system could be instituted. I'll leave the closing words to Marc:
Imagine 6 billion or 10 billion people doing nothing but arts and sciences, culture and exploring and learning. What a world that would be. The problem seems unlikely to be that we’ll get there too fast. The problem seems likely to be that we’ll get there too slow.