Tag: liberal

What’s the Purpose of K-12 Education in the Age of Automation?

What’s the Purpose of K-12 Education in the Age of Automation?

Daniel Susskind For the past decade, schools have placed significant emphasis on getting students ready for careers. The problem is that it’s not clear what kind of jobs will be available in ten or 20 years. So what should that mean for K-12 teaching?

Daniel Susskind, a fellow in economics at Oxford University, tackled that question—and many others—in his recent book, A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond . In it, he describes a possible future where liberal arts education would take on increasing importance as people look for meaningful ways to spend their time in […]

Cancel work: The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that work is not a virtue

Cancel work: The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that work is not a virtue

Several years ago, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released an overview of the Green New Deal that mentioned guaranteeing "economic security" for people who are "unable or unwilling to work." When conservative critics noticed those last three words, they pounced. Fox News waxed poetic about the "dignity of work" and Breitbart sneered at the "self-described Democratic Socialist" whose "radical proposal" ignored that even "traditional American liberalism regarded full employment as its goal because of the importance of work to society and the individual."

Indeed, there is a deep-seated belief in American society that one’s survival is tied to work — and, thus, those […]

Why people should get paid to let AI do their jobs for them

Why people should get paid to let AI do their jobs for them

The idea of a universal minimum/basic income (UBI) isn’t new or nearly as radical as those both in favor and opposed to it would have you believe. Dozens of cities across the globe are either currently running or have run UBI test programs. And the results are usually positive.

Simply put: the outcomes for people who receive a UBI are typically demonstrably better than people in similar financial and economic situations who don’t.

But a significant number of people ranging from laypersons to economics experts believe that paying people for what they consider “not working” is a bad idea.The solution, of […]

Is India’s policy negligence hurtling its agriculture down the MSME route?

Satya Sheel

Satya Sheel Khosla is a former MD and JV partner of Suzuki Motorcycles. He now develops sustainable solutions for high-density cities.

The parable of ‘blind men and an elephant’ increasingly seems to represent India’s agriculture policies, just as it previously did for India’s Industrialization.Planning in silos coupled with tenured postings has denied India policy continuity, accountability and efficacy. Despite overwhelming precedence, Indian policy makers have failed to recognise that ensuring rural growth demands a multipronged policy thrust. Over 55% India resides in villages. Shifting rural youth to industrial or construction jobs; innovation in sustainable farm technologies, finance and […]

Books Reviewed in 2020

Books Reviewed in 2020

2020 was a terrible year for the world. 2020 was a great year for books.

Here are the books that I reviewed for IHE, along with a couple that I co-authored.

Would love to hear (in a letter to the editor, or an e-mail, or a tweet, or a TikTok, or whatever) if we read any of the same books in 2020. See you all in 2021. Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education by Joshua Kim and Edward Maloney The Low-Density University: 15 Scenarios for Higher Education by Edward Maloney and Joshua KimForeword to ‘Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to […]

Universal basic income trial backed in Swansea

Universal basic income trial backed in Swansea

Money Richard Youle, local democracy reporter

The replacement of the welfare system with a sum of money paid to everyone, irrespective of their means, has been endorsed by Swansea councillors.

They supported a motion which backed the concept of universal basic income (UBI) and the value of trialling it, potentially in Swansea.The motion suggested that the current welfare system was failing, and that UBI could address inequality, poverty and precarious employment by giving workers greater freedom to change their job, valuing unpaid work and removing the negative impacts of benefit sanctions.It said the success of a pilot UBI should be […]

The Relevance of Utopianism

The Relevance of Utopianism

One summer during my youth I was hired to work the assembly line at a television manufacturer. This was in the days when America had a manufacturing base and actually produced consumer goods. I found myself working next to a conveyor belt slapping stickers onto large cathode ray tubes as they left an oven from another part of the factory. (From Wikipedia : The cathode-ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube that contains one or more electron guns and a phosphorescent screen, and is used to display images.) These tubes resembled enormous Bosc pears. The screen size was 15 […]

Cyber Republic: Reinventing Democracy in the Age of Intelligent Machines (excerpt)

Cyber Republic: Reinventing Democracy in the Age of Intelligent Machines (excerpt)

Excerpted from Cyber Republic: Reinventing Democracy in the Age of Intelligent Machine s , by George Zarkadakis (footnotes omitted). Copyright © MIT Press, 2020. Distributed by The MIT Press. Excerpted by permission of MIT Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. A WORLD WITHOUT WORK

DIGITIZATION, DIGITALIZATION, AND THE AUTOMATION OF WORK

The displacement effect of technological disruption is always easier to predict than the compensation effect. That is because most new technologies are invented in order to generate cost efficiencies in the present, which […]

The Relevance of Utopianism

The Relevance of Utopianism

Review of Aaron Benanav’s book Automation and the Future of Work One summer during my youth I was hired to work the assembly line at a television manufacturer. This was in the days when America had a manufacturing base and actually produced consumer goods. I found myself working next to a conveyor belt slapping stickers onto large cathode ray tubes as they left an oven from another part of the factory. (From Wikipedia: The cathode-ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube that contains one or more electron guns and a phosphorescent screen, and is used to display images.) These […]

Automation and the Future of Work (excerpt)

Automation and the Future of Work (excerpt)

Automation and the Future of Work Excerpted from Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav (footnotes omitted). Copyright 2020 Verso Books. Used with permission of the Verso Books. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Chapter 6

Necessity and Freedom

Even if one doubts automation theorists’ account of technological progress—as I certainly do—their attempt to imagine and chart a path toward a post-scarcity future remains their thought’s most attractive aspect, because it allows us to pose the question of how the pieces of this defunct […]