At first, you’re like, “oh, another piece where someone makes fun of us nerds and misunderstands our damagingly sarcastic way of saying everything that belies the privilege we all live under.” Then you’re like, “oh, this is actually a good piece.” E.g.: Human rights work attempts to prevent the abusive deployment of power against those who have little of it. While technology might disrupt some power structures, it might also reinforce them, and it is rarely designed to empower the most vulnerable populations.

Some intersting history of how Facebook grew users. Of course, this the case study is for a free service, that focuses on a high volume of users. I.e.: not an enterprise sales business that charges $3m+ per user-cum-customers. Contextualizing aside, there’s some good product thinking: Better know what your product is good for: Knowing true core product value allows you to design the experiments necessary so that you can really isolate cause and effect.

A few weeks back my book review of two “the robots are taking over” came out over on The New Stack. Here’s some responses, and also some highlights from a McKinsey piece on automation. Don’t call it “automation” From John Allspaw: There is much more to this topic. Nick Carr’s book, The Glass Cage, has a different perspective. The ramifications of new technology (don’t call it automation) are notoriously difficult to predict, and what we think are forgone conclusions (unemployment of truck drivers even though the tech for self-driving cars needs to see much more diversity of conditions before it can get to the 99%+ accuracy) are not.

I reviewed two books on automation and digital transforming this month: The Wealth of Humans and Silicon Collar. These two books go well together because the first describes how automation is lowering the need for labor, leading, likely, to less jobs, while the second provides a compendium of examples of such software-driven labor change. Vinnie’s book has the optimism of a technologist, while Avent’s is much more fraught. Both accurately describe how IT is optimizing and replacing “analog” labor and businesses, leaving the core problem of devaluing human labor, perhaps to the point of eliminating millions of jobs, permanently.

The big takeaway is that small increases in IT budgets are the new normal. Unlike previous recoveries, we have not seen a large jump in IT spending over the past five years. So if a CIO is only seeing a two or three percent increase this year, he or she should understand that is pretty much in line with other companies. See more guidance charts on IT priorities, n=190.

The big takeaway is that small increases in IT budgets are the new normal. Unlike previous recoveries, we have not seen a large jump in IT spending over the past five years. So if a CIO is only seeing a two or three percent increase this year, he or she should understand that is pretty much in line with other companies. See more guidance charts on IT priorities, n=190.

The big takeaway is that small increases in IT budgets are the new normal. Unlike previous recoveries, we have not seen a large jump in IT spending over the past five years. So if a CIO is only seeing a two or three percent increase this year, he or she should understand that is pretty much in line with other companies. See more guidance charts on IT priorities, n=190.

The big takeaway is that small increases in IT budgets are the new normal. Unlike previous recoveries, we have not seen a large jump in IT spending over the past five years. So if a CIO is only seeing a two or three percent increase this year, he or she should understand that is pretty much in line with other companies. See more guidance charts on IT priorities, n=190.

The big takeaway is that small increases in IT budgets are the new normal. Unlike previous recoveries, we have not seen a large jump in IT spending over the past five years. So if a CIO is only seeing a two or three percent increase this year, he or she should understand that is pretty much in line with other companies. See more guidance charts on IT priorities, n=190.

The big takeaway is that small increases in IT budgets are the new normal. Unlike previous recoveries, we have not seen a large jump in IT spending over the past five years. So if a CIO is only seeing a two or three percent increase this year, he or she should understand that is pretty much in line with other companies. See more guidance charts on IT priorities, n=190.