11 Questions You Need to Ask a Digital Agency Before Working with Them
Written by Joaquín Gatti for Elevate. Our 10 year experience creating digital products has allowed us to elaborate the ultimate guide for you to choose the right partner to work with based on both client and product needs.
If Companies Had No Employees – The Economist – Medium
More and more jobs are vanishing, and they aren’t going to come back.
But it’s a weird sort of vanishing. Until the late ’70s, our increasing worker productivity meant more pay per worker, and a drop in prices of goods. At that point, we started to need fewer workers to make all the stuff anyone would want, and that meant that wages dropped, too. Some of this briefly got hidden by “offshoring” — it was cheaper to move manufacturing to China, then to Bangladesh, and so on — but now those countries are starting to see automation take jobs away, too. The cost of production is dropping to zero.
via Why We Should Value ‘Invisible Labor’ – Member Feature Stories – Medium
Stacking the Bricks: How the Blog Broke the Web
I first got online in 1993, back when the Web had a capital letter — three, in fact — and long before irony stretched its legs and unbuttoned its flannel shirt. Back when you could really say you were surfing the net.
Surviving the Retail Apocalypse |
We’ve all heard about the retail apocalypse and the supposed demise of malls. It’s a familiar refrain: chains expanded too fast, and malls, especially in the mid-tier, are overbuilt and dying. E-commerce is eating into brick & mortar shopping.
Take a Photo Here – The New York Times
Images from Instagram: The stairwell at the New Museum in New York.We carry the cameras built into our phones around all the time, and the resulting flood of images says something about what people, in the aggregate, like to photograph.
In 1996, as the World Wide Web was taking off, Larry Page and Sergey Brin watched from the sidelines. Unlike the rest of Silicon Valley, they weren’t interested in using the Internet to buy and sell stuff, or to read and publish stories, or even to score Grateful Dead tickets.
Reversed Aging, Pig Organs, and the Future of Humankind
For a man playing God, George Church certainly looks the part. Over the past 45 years, the Harvard geneticist and his bushy white beard have published hundreds of papers and earned dozens of patents expanding our ability to read, write, and edit DNA, the code of life. He was among the first to apply the gene editing tool CRISPR to mammalian cells (he tied with his former postdoc). Church and his eclectic lab have pushed bioengineering in multiple directions, showing how it can be used to resurrect mammoths, eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitos, produce atmosphere-cleansing bacteria, and even detect bits of dark matter pelting us from space. He once stored 70 billion copies of his book, Regenesis, in a drop of DNA the size of a period after translating it into the As, Ts, Cs, and Gs of DNA’s double helix. But we wanted to talk with Church about the future of humanity, and to that end, he mused on pig organs, dating apps, brains in a dish, and artificial intelligence.
[Essay] Known Unknowns | New Dark Age by James Bridle | Harper’s Magazine
This cautionary tale, repeated often in the academic literature on machine learning, is probably apocryphal, but it illustrates an important question about artificial intelligence: What can we know about what a machine knows? Whatever artificial intelligence might come to be, it will be fundamentally different from us, and ultimately inscrutable. Despite increasingly sophisticated systems of computation and visualization, we do not truly understand how machine learning does what it does; we can only adjudicate the results.
If you’ve ever worked on an app, you can only dream of that feeling of pure joy when you open the App Store and see your app featured on the homepage.
