The unintended effect of driverless cars. Just think about how much excess capacity we have in personal automobiles, both those on the road and those parked.
The unintended effects of driverless cars
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Tag Archives: internet as disruption
Hypereconomics
While it is conceivable that PayPal could become a ‘financial API’, capitalizing all of the pieces of a production value chain, PayPal, like eBay, is an artifact of the transition to hyperconnectivity, an arbitrageur exploiting imperfections in hyperconnectivity. Once everyone is directly connected, it is possible to transfer capital between peers, without any mediating exchange service.
Given the capital flow restrictions of central banks, fiat currencies can not be employed in transactions crossing international boundaries. Instead, individuals and organizations will begin to develop their own exchange mechanisms, perhaps based on precious metals (a de facto return to the gold standard), but more likely employing virtual currencies: perhaps kilowatt-hours, abstract ‘labour units’, or other measures of value.
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As capital migrates from friction-filled national and international finance markets into hypereconomic frameworks, institutions dependent upon those frictions will be threatened. Banks will not be able to collect interest. Governments will not be able to tax – customs duties and user fees look to be the only ways governments can generate revenue. Courts will not be able to seize assets. The peculiar arrangement of laws and regulations which keep our economic system stable will grow increasingly meaningless. Governments and courts will try to follow capital flows into hypereconomic zones, only to learn that their mechanisms of control and enforcement are poorly matched to such a fluid environment.
Mark Pesce — Hypereconomics
Are Jobs Obsolete?
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We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.
Douglas Rushkoff — Are Jobs Obsolete?
The Local-Global Flip, Or, “The Lanier Effect”
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The Local-Global Flip, Or, “The Lanier Effect”. Absolutely fascinating interview. Two technologies on the cusp of going mainstream: self-driving cars and (dis)assembling robots. Also, technological efficiencies tend to have a positive benefit to the already wealthy (you save more money) but a negative benefit to the already middle-class or poor (you don’t have any money to begin with). What do we do when machines can do it better?
Colleges in crisis
The success of these online competitors and the crisis among many of higher education’s traditional institutions are far from unique. These are familiar steps in a process known as “disruptive innovation” that has occurred in many industries, from accounting and music to communications and computers. It is the process by which products and services that were once so expensive, complicated, inaccessible, and inconvenient that only a small fraction of people could access them, are transformed into simpler, more accessible and convenient forms that are also, ultimately, lower in cost. We are seeing it happen more rapidly than one could have imagined in higher education, as online learning has exploded: roughly 10 percent of students took at least one online course in 2003, 25 percent in 2008, and nearly 30 percent in the fall of 2009.
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Although this transition has begun, much of online learning’s promise for higher education is still on the horizon. For example, online learning has not yet led to lower prices from the perspective of many students—even though many of the online universities operate at lower costs than the traditional universities and enable students to fit coursework around existing jobs or other responsibilities. To date, moreover, significant portions of online learning have not taken advantage of this new medium to personalize instruction and create new, dynamic and individualized learning pathways within a course for students.
Clayton Christensen — Colleges in crisis. Emphasis mine.
The History of Dialogue: Other People’s Papers
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But not knowing what plagiarism is isn’t really the problem. It’s unfortunate that right now the university is cracking down so hard on plagiarism. And the reason the university is cracking down so hard on plagiarism is because their product is less and less valuable these days. When students plagiarize, there’s an implicit recognition that “I’m just doing this for the grade.” That’s why they do it. And that’s the way that the majority of students look at the university, and have been for some time now. At my college, the frats had rooms full of file cabinets full of plagiarized papers. Plagiarism is old news. It’s really not just that plagiarism is getting easier to do, with the Internet. The problem is now that the grade doesn’t even get you the job.
The History of Dialogue: Other People’s Papers. (via Andrew and Robin)
On The Network Manifesto
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On The Network Manifesto. Ten reasons why the internet isn’t as bad as traditional media wants us to think it is. My favorite: “People make the internet what it is. If you don’t like it, make it better.”
The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable
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The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable. It’s called Silk Road. The URL is incredibly obscure, you can only access the site through Tor, and Bitcoins (explanation) are the defacto currency. Shipments go through the U.S. Postal Service. It was destined to happen.
The Great Ephemeralization
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The Great Ephemeralization. Big picture: Today’s economic growth indices, like GDP, are poor at accounting for the effects of ephemeralization, or the processby which “special-purpose products are replaced by software running on general-purpose computing devices.”
Disrupting College
Disrupting College. New report by Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn, Louis Soares, and Louis Caldera addresses the challenges faced by our education industry, where disruptive innovation is likely to occur, and offers approaches for existing institutions to adopt. Analysis is spot on.
