Jeffrey Funk

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A World Without Work? Don’t Hold Your Breath

_{Predictions of mass unemployment caused by robots continue to be wildly inaccurate}_{Gary Smith
May 26, 2021}

Will we soon be sitting on couches watching reality TV shows while robots work 24/7 doing all of the work humans used to do? The idea that robots will replace most human labor has been around for almost 100 years and has become more popular with each new advance, from sensors and microprocessors to enterprise software, data analytics, and AI. The latest wave of robot hysteria was tweaked by The Singularity is Near in 2005, emboldened by Race Against the Machine in 2012, and sent over the top by The Second Machine Age and The Rise of Robots in 2016, and A World Without Work in 2020, all best sellers. A World Without Work was shortlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey 2020 Business Book of the Year, in addition Read More ›

AI’s Future: Combining RPA With AI to Augment Knowledge Workers

_{The work machines can’t do is usually the rewarding part, both personally and financially}_{George Bara
April 19, 2021}

Counterterrorism requires analysts to work through millions of Twitter and Facebook messages, YouTube videos, and websites in multiple languages, far too much work for humans. But a combination of AI (artificial intelligence) and RPA (robotic process automation) can help humans do this work, leaving humans in charge of the most complex and important decisions. AI systems can crawl through documents in any language, automatically translating them, extracting names of people and organizations, and doing sentiment analysis of conversations to identify key text to be considered later by humans. This text can be automatically organized into proper bins using RPA, enabling a data processing and analytics pipeline that can handle large amounts of content at speeds never possible in the past. Read More ›

Why We Need to Stop Relying On Patents to Measure Innovation

_{The key to a nation's long-run economic growth is the effect of innovation on productivity, and has little to do with patent activity}_{Gary Smith
March 22, 2021}

Patent databases may be a smoke screen that hides the true issues, problems, and dynamics of innovation behind the illusion that innovation is booming—and that patent activity measures the boom. We are said to live in a time of remarkable innovation, with the computer/information revolution often compared to the Industrial Revolution in allowing people to produce more while working less. Economists, consultants, and other business gurus are striving mightily to quantify this revolution and to understand its sources and implications. One popular metric is the number of new patents issued each year. For example, the pace of innovation might be gauged by the fact that there were 669,434 US patent applications and 390,499 new patents awarded in 2019, each triple the Read More ›

Why Are There No New Googles and Amazons?

_{The internet has matured, making many new internet-based companies comparatively low-tech}_{Jeffrey Funk
June 2, 2020}

Today’s startups have targeted a much different set of technologies than did startups in past decades.

Why Do Today’s Tech Startups Disappoint Investors?

_{Only 14 of the 45 recent Unicorns showed increases larger than those of the Nasdaq generally}_{Jeffrey Funk
June 1, 2020}

Companies we hear a lot about, like Zoom and Beyond Meat, are not profitable compared to an earlier generation of tech startups.

Where Have All the Profitable Startups Gone?

_{We must distinguish between COVID-19's devastating impact and pre-existing problems that it is making worse}_{Jeffrey Funk
May 27, 2020}

The most successful startups of today aren’t as profitable as those founded 20 to 50 years ago. Something is terribly wrong with the current startup system.

Stanford’s AI Index Report: How Much Is BS?

_{Some measurements of AI’s economic impact sound like the metrics that fueled the dot-com bubble}_{Jeffrey Funk
March 3, 2020}

Stanford University’s AI index offers us fanciful measures of the triumph of AI, rivaling the far-fetched metrics of dot-com commerce. The reality has been the opposite. For decades, U.S. productivity grew by about 3% a year. Then, after 1970, it slowed to 1.5% a year, then 1%, now about 0.5%. Perhaps we are spending too much time on our smartphones.