Employee burnout and stress is a big problem in the average American workplace, but it’s especially true among some of the country’s biggest tech companies, many of which have famously rigorous workplace cultures that often encourage long hours, favor young people, and sometimes require unreasonably high levels of productivity.
Blind, a message board app created for employees to talk about work anonymously, surveyed more than 11,000 employees at 30 of the biggest tech companies to find out just how many of them feel burnt out by their work.
The designers behind the world’s newest cruise ship have never been on a cruise. But if this approach seems crazy, well, it’s all strategy. The group, dubbed the “Creative Collective” and led by the likes of Roman and Williams (The Boom Boom Room, Le Coucou, Ace Hotels), Concrete Amsterdam (citizenM hotels, W London), and Tom Dixon’s Design Research Studio (Shoreditch House, Mondrian Hotels), are deep into designing Virgin’s cruise line with the aim of attracting travelers who normally wouldn’t touch the idea of taking a cruise with a ten foot pole. In fact, Rob Wagemans of Concrete Amsterdam joined the project under the condition that he wouldn’t have to go on any existing cruises at all.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is convinced that one day “we are going to have to leave this planet.” And he believes that his Blue Origin space company can help make it happen.
Outlining his ambitious vision at the Space Development Conference in Los Angeles during a recent on-stage chat with GeekWire‘s Alan Boyle, Bezos said that, ideally, Blue Origin would collaborate with NASA or ESA, Europe’s space agency, to move toward his goal, though he said that if that doesn’t work out, his company would go it alone.
Congress and the Trump administration have yet to create a coherent policy response to a widely forecast social and economic tsunami resulting from automation, including the potential for decades of flat wages and joblessness. But cities and regions are starting to act on their own.
What’s happening: In Indianapolis, about 338,000 people are at high risk of automation taking their jobs, according to a new report. In Phoenix, the number is 650,000. In both cases, that’s 35% of the workforce. In northeastern Ohio, about 40,000 workers are at high risk.
The Seattle giant believes selling you groceries is the key to selling you everything else.
At 9 a.m. on June 16, 2017, Whole Foods employees packed into the main level of the company’s Austin headquarters. Only an hour earlier Amazon had announced that it was acquiring the high-end natural grocer, and the corporate staffers were as shocked as the rest of the public. Amazon had been militant about leaks during the seven weeks that the two companies had been in negotiations, and the vast majority of those working inside the building had been unaware that the deal was afoot.
The Chinese tech giant Alibaba is expanding aggressively into physical retail through investments in a variety of product categories to push its “New Retail” strategy of combining online and offline shopping.
Its most critical New Retail venture has been Hema Xiansheng, a futuristic supermarket launched in 2015 that offers free 30-minute delivery and payment using facial-recognition technology.
Deeply integrated with Alibaba’s technology and services, Hema provides a window into where Amazon may try to take Whole Foods in the future.
We all know what happens when industrial revolutions come to town, right? Higher productivity as machines take over, coupled with job losses for the people whose jobs are now being done faster, more efficiently, and cheaper by machines.
At least, that’s one way of looking at it. But, as the following video from the WSJ makes clear, there’s another interpretation available for what will happen to the global workforce in light of the tidal wave of changes coming related to tech and AI.
They call it “the hive,” or “the grid.” Or sometimes just: “the machine.” It’s a huge structure that fills a warehouse on the outskirts of Andover, a small and quiet town in southeast England. It’s impossible to take in at a single glance, but standing on a maintenance walkway near the building’s rafters, you look over what seems to be a huge chessboard, populated entirely by robots. There are more than a thousand of them, each the size and shape of a washing machine, and they wheel about, night and day, moving groceries. Their job is to be cheaper and more efficient than humans, and they are very good at it.
The hive-grid-machine is the creation of Ocado, a British online-only supermarket that’s made a name for itself in recent years designing highly automated warehouses and selling the tech to other grocery chains. When fully up and running, Ocado’s Andover operation will be its most advanced yet, processing 3.5 million items or around 65,000 orders every week. It’s also a perfect example of the wave of automation slowly hitting countries around the world. The tasks being undertaken by Ocado’s bots are so basic they’re best described by simple verbs — “lifting,” “moving,” “sorting” — and that means they exist in various forms in a range of industries. And when the price is right, someone will want a machine to do those jobs, too.
SAN FRANCISCO — Some of the biggest names on Wall Street are warming up to Bitcoin, a virtual currency that for nearly a decade has been consigned to the unregulated fringes of the financial world.
The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange has been working on an online trading platform that would allow large investors to buy and hold Bitcoin, according to emails and documents viewed by The New York Times and four people briefed on the effort who asked to remain anonymous because the plans were still confidential.
It wasn’t so long ago that the market for initial public offerings — in which a promising and often young private company first allows public investors to buy its stock, often as a way to raise money and invest in the future — was booming. In the two decades before 2000, America was averaging some 300 IPOs a year. In fact, volume was considerably higher than that from 1990 to 2000, reaching 706 in 1996, for example.
Then they fell off a cliff. Last year, there were a mere 147. What happened?
Across the world, the pace of industrial automation is steadily accelerating. According to the International Federation of Robotics, there were 66 installed industrial robots per 10,000 employees globally in 2015 and that increased to 74 in 2016. Broken down by region, average robot density in Europe is 99 units per 10,000 workers, while’s it’s 84 in the Americas and 63 in Asia. Even though China has recorded the most dynamic development of robot density in recent years, South Korea has the highest level of density of any country on the planet.
