  (The below has been cross-posted to the website for the Darden School of Business's Center for Global Initiatives.) Drawn by a course title of Artificial Intelligence and Technological Unemployment, I signed up for the Darden Worldwide Course to Germany with apprehension. Would visiting companies on the cutting-edge of technology prove that the future would be shaped more by robots rather than by people? Doom and gloom didn’t seem like a fun precursor to a summer internship and final year of B-school. Having worked internationally before Darden, I knew that studying new technologies overseas would help me separate modern realities from mere cultural assumptions. Through conversations with technologists during the DWC to Germany, I came to appreciate just how much of an impact decision-making by business leaders will have on placing people at the center of an automated future. People-Centered Automation In Hamburg, we visited the Port of Hamburg and an Amazon fulfillment warehouse. While both facilities were impressive in their own right, each took a unique approach to ensure people remained integral to the overall function of an otherwise fully-automated facility. At the Port of Hamburg, One of the terminals is fully automated, replete with self-driving trucks, automated cranes, and massive robots diligently rearranging shipping containers. And yet, while technical innovation has completely transformed this warehouse, the difficulties of societal changes keeping pace with technological change are evident: local traffic laws required that self-driving cars operating in a human-free environment must still use turn signals, and union contracts required that union members control the first and final meter of transport for the fully autonomous cranes. The port leaders voiced frustration, pointing out how rules designed to keep humans involved put them at a competitive disadvantage versus nearby ports. The Amazon warehouse takes a different approach, deploying robotics selectively (at least for now) to complement workers. Workers retain the responsibility of handling products, but can work more efficiently by utilizing robots to bring shelves of products to them – eliminating walking or movement time almost entirely. Despite these measures minimizing the labor-intensive aspects of the process, we learned that the facility continues to hire more and more employees while fulfilling a staggering amount of orders each week. The nature of the job and the skills required to complete the work have changed for these employees, but there is more work and more hiring than ever. Education in a Land of Robots To help train its young people, Germany uses a variety of programs and norms that I found really interesting. We visited Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg, a university where students applied not to the university but rather to companies. If accepted, the students received a tuition-free education and alternated between academic studies and an internship with their employer every six weeks, all while receiving a paycheck. The state pays for the education and the employer provides practical, real-world experience. Even among more traditional schools, working students are a well-established norm. Nearly all the companies we visited had sizable portions of their workforce set aside for students, with expectations adjusted to account for concurrent studies. In my own experience, my job during college was unrelated to my field of study. Students in Germany, however, had access to a wide breadth of opportunities with employers experienced in training current students in areas of growing interest and relevance to the student body. Bold, but Thoughtful Both professionally and culturally, Germany seems open to experimentation and reinvention. We spent the final few nights in Berlin, the center of Germany’s startup scene. We met founders experimenting with different approaches to building privacy-sensitive AI systems. We met students experimenting with machine vision technologies to combat urban congestion. But we also saw reinvention elsewhere too: portions of the Berlin Wall remade into counter-cultural art galleries, and old Soviet-build mansions repurposed into nightclubs. I can’t say whether the German apprenticeship model will serve Germany well through the rise of automation and AI. But I can say that Germany is broadly committed to experimenting and building a pragmatic system that works to both embrace automation in a thoughtful way and to ensure that all of its citizens are able to develop the in-demand skills they will need in the years ahead. Back in the United States, I worked with technology clients in the Bay Area during my consulting summer internship. By drawing on examples from the DWC to Germany, I helped my client reframe how a new technology could be used at the company without stoking anxiety among employees. As more and more industries adapt to these new technologies, I’m glad to be able to draw on my DWC experiences and provide more thoughtful guidance to my clients.
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 Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a frustratingly engaging read that perpetually establishes and upends expectations. The book profiles several inhabitants of Annawadi, a slum in Mumbai, through various episodes in their lives. A former reporter for the Washington Post, Katherine Boo blends familiar human emotions with brazenly alien circumstances and forces readers to humanize invisible members of India’s global city.
In an early chapter, Boo describes an Annawadi resident: "Asha, a fighter-cock of a woman who lived by the public toilet, was differently ambitious. She longed to be Annawadi’s first female slumlord, then ride the city’s inexorable corruption into the middle class." While I found it easy to object to Asha’s ready embrace of corruption, her aspirations to rise to the middle class are disarmingly modest. In a later chapter, I found myself unsure who to root for. Following a young woman’s injuries, Boo chronicles the challenges of transporting her to a hospital: "No autorickshaw driver had wanted to transport a woman in such a state as she, given the potential damage to seat covers. But three young men had intervened, getting her to the hospital by threatening a driver with his life." I wasn’t sure whether the driver was being incredibly callous, or simply protecting his sole livelihood. I wasn’t sure whether the young men were Good Samaritans, or unforgivably violent. I knew the book was non-fiction, but wished it weren’t. Through stories like these, Behind the Beautiful Forevers is an engaging read that helps surface the fullness, complexities, and contradictions tucked away in modern Mumbai. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, by Yuval Levin1/27/2017  Yuval Levin is the founding editor of National Affairs and a leading conservative public intellectual who worked in the second Bush Administration. Great Debate is the first of his books that I read. By outlining the life experiences of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, Levin explores how their perspectives slowly evolved into the foundations of liberal and conservative political ideologies in America. The book illuminates the hidden ‘why’ behind how liberals and conservatives think the way do across a variety of issues.
While I knew a decent amount about Thomas Paine from various U.S. history classes, I found Burke a fascinating foil to Paine in his sympathetic and structured, but fundamentally anti-enlightenment views. I appreciated Burke’s emphasis on modest and incremental progress combined with a skepticism of grandiose change as a welcome contrast to the more radical forms of conservatism on display lately at the national level in the U.S. In a later chapter, Levin characterizes Burke’s view of reform: The fundamental insight of his positive case for reform is that a statesman ought to begin from gratitude for what works in his society, rather than from outrage at what does not work. He must begin from a sense of what he has and what is worth preserving and from there build toward what he wants and what is worth achieving. But without question, change is not only inevitable but desirable. And without developing an effective means of change, a nation “might even risk the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.” 1 Burke’s recognition of the contradiction in reforming for the sake of preservation is the clearest articulation of what conservatism could and should be. Great Debate is an informative rather than advocative work, and I look forward to reading Levin’s subsequent book The Fractured Republic to delve into thoughtful examples of what Burkean ideas could look like in the twenty-first century. 1. Burke, Writings, 8:180
The Fallen of World War II from Neil Halloran on Vimeo. Neil Halloran's visualisation is a haunting reminder of the horrific scale of the Second World War. The 18-minute video includes interactive charts that represent each 1,000 lost lives as a single icon. With nearly 70 million deaths resulting from the war, the war dwarfed all conflicts prior and, thankfully, since.
TechCrunch's Kim-Mai Cutler posted an excellent and well-researched article on the housing market in the Bay Area. The article avoids attributing the housing crisis to malice or pure mismanagement. Instead, the article explorers the conflicting interests, motivations, and policies - along with basic supply and demand - that laid the foundation for persistently high rent and property prices.
There is no shortage of content online and a seemingly endless amount of services that suggest content based on stated interests, friends' recommendations, and algorithmic predictions. This blog aims to serve as a growing reading list - a curated collection of thoughtful articles and analyses covering three increasingly interesting and interwoven areas: technology, economics, and public policy.
My hope is that you find the articles collected interesting, informative, and thought-provoking. |
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