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Technology in Teaching at Senior Delhi Schools
In the modern educational landscape, technology has become an integral part of teaching and learning. Senior schools in Delhi are at the forefront of this transformation, leveraging technology to enhance the educational experience and prepare students for a digital future. This blog explores how technology is used in teaching at these institutions and the benefits it brings to the learning environment.
1. Interactive Classrooms
Technology has revolutionized traditional classrooms, making them more interactive and engaging. Smartboards and interactive whiteboards are commonly used to present lessons in a dynamic and visually appealing manner. These tools allow teachers to incorporate multimedia elements, such as videos, animations, and interactive exercises, making complex concepts more accessible and interesting for students.
2. Digital Learning Resources
The availability of digital learning resources has expanded the educational toolkit for both teachers and students. Online textbooks, educational apps, and e-learning platforms provide a wealth of information and interactive content that supports classroom instruction. These resources allow students to explore subjects in greater depth and at their own pace, enhancing their understanding and retention of material.
3. Virtual Laboratories and Simulations
For subjects like science and engineering, virtual laboratories and simulations offer hands-on learning experiences that might not be feasible in a traditional classroom setting. These digital tools enable students to conduct experiments, visualize complex processes, and practice problem-solving in a safe and controlled environment. Virtual labs provide valuable opportunities for experiential learning and experimentation.
4. Blended Learning Models
Blended learning models combine traditional face-to-face instruction with online learning components. This approach allows students to benefit from both in-person interactions and digital resources. For example, teachers might use online modules for homework assignments, quizzes, and supplemental learning materials, while reserving classroom time for discussions and collaborative activities.
5. Personalized Learning Experiences
Technology enables personalized learning experiences by adapting to each student’s needs and learning style. Adaptive learning platforms use algorithms to provide customized content and assessments based on individual performance. This personalization helps students work at their own pace, receive targeted feedback, and focus on areas where they need additional support.
6. Enhanced Collaboration
Collaboration tools and platforms facilitate group work and communication among students. Tools like online discussion boards, collaborative documents, and virtual meeting spaces enable students to work together on projects, share ideas, and provide peer feedback, even outside the classroom. These technologies promote teamwork and enhance the learning experience through collective problem-solving.
7. Data-Driven Insights
Technology provides valuable data-driven insights into student performance and progress. Learning management systems (LMS) and educational software track and analyze student data, such as grades, attendance, and engagement levels. Teachers can use this data to identify patterns, assess learning outcomes, and tailor instruction to better meet individual and group needs.
8. Access to Global Perspectives
The internet and digital communication tools provide access to global perspectives and resources. Through online research, virtual field trips, and international collaborations, students can explore diverse cultures, viewpoints, and educational materials. This global exposure broadens students’ horizons and enhances their understanding of the world.
9. Support for Diverse Learning Needs
Technology supports diverse learning needs by offering a range of tools and resources tailored to different abilities and preferences. For example, text-to-speech software, audiobooks, and interactive apps can assist students with learning differences or disabilities. These technologies help create an inclusive learning environment where all students can thrive.
10. Preparing for the Future
Incorporating technology into teaching not only enhances the current learning experience but also prepares students for future challenges. Familiarity with digital tools, online research methods, and virtual collaboration is essential for success in higher education and the modern workforce. By integrating technology into the classroom, schools equip students with the skills and knowledge needed for a technology-driven world.
Conclusion
Technology has become a cornerstone of teaching at senior schools in Delhi, transforming the educational experience and preparing students for a digital future. By leveraging interactive tools, digital resources, and personalized learning platforms, schools create engaging and effective learning environments. Understanding the role of technology in teaching can help you appreciate the advancements in education and the benefits they offer to students.
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Showcase Your True Potential: How skill sharing can shape thousands of lives
Joe Yakeen Vinitha | Mentor & Business Coach
The first time I heard the word ‘trading-positions’ was during one of my mastermind sessions with enthusiastic entrepreneurs. One of the participants gave an example which used this word and I was like what… But I did not forget to learn that from her and now I do trading!
While doing all the research, tips & trick of trading, I realized I was becoming a part of a much larger, much more humane community of sharing skills with anybody who wanted to learn just in an attempt to make their lives better. In a way to connect people through their interests on a similar ground, the difference being one person is already adept at the particular field and the others just interested to learn.
To be honest, the concept of sharing skills is not something alien. We have all grown up with it. Take every mother who has taught her child to cook or every father who helped his kid with their homework. Thanks to the internet, skill sharing has become even more popular, allowing people to connect online and benefit from a person and their skillset even though they are physically miles apart.
As Moses de Maimon, a Jewish philosopher, better known as Maimonides, says: “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.”
Here's some more information on how skill sharing works, and most importantly, how it can benefit you, your career, and most importantly, the not so privileged.
WHAT IS SKILL SHARING?

Skill sharing to put it in absolute layman terms is when people share their skills with others. While it can happen in a formal setting – like a classroom – it can also occur casually at meetups, community centres, and even in people's homes.
For example, if you may be a freelance graphic designer who wants to learn social media marketing, you can agree to exchange design lessons for a tutorial in an online marketing strategy. Or, if you are a project manager looking to increase your web knowledge, you might take an online or in-person coding course.
WHY YOU NEED SKILL SHARING IN THE FIRST PLACE?
Every person possesses a separate skill set which makes him unique. But the power of it is not keeping it confined, it's in sharing it. Call that friend who is weak in your favourite subject and help him out. Skill sharing is how we grow stronger as a team.
It is said the strength of your team is the strength of its weakest person. So why not help them grow? There is only so much we can grow as individuals. Every sector in our lives we need a team to grow. Starting from our family, our primary and secondary education to our peer group and work life. Whether formal or informal, any successful project, be it big or small, has one thing at its core: effective collaboration, and you cannot achieve that without knowledge sharing.
“In our research on knowledge transfer, we have seen companies greatly disadvantaged, if not crippled, by knowledge loss. Certainly, some expert knowledge may be outdated or irrelevant by the time its possessors are eligible for retirement, but not the skills, know-how, and capabilities that underlie critical operations — both routine and innovative. Organizations cannot afford to lose these deep smarts” says Dorothy Leonard, the William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration Emerita at Harvard Business School.
Here are 10 BENEFITS that you can get from sharing your knowledge:
1. It helps you grow
As Claudio Fernández-Aráoz put it, “The question is not whether your company’s employees and leaders have the right skills; it’s whether they have the potential to learn new ones”. We can only accomplish a certain number of goals with a limited skill set. But once we start learning new skills the opportunities for us are endless. They say you could learn something from everybody in your life. Let us make sure we actually do!

2. It helps you stay motivated
Even among peers, skill sharing can play an important role to motivate you to get better at your skills and try to acquire new ones. Seeing your peers showcase their skills pushes you forward in healthy competition as well as a team effort for all of you to develop on your skills. We are all achievers on the inside. Sharing knowledge practices pushes you to become better at what you do while driving you at the same time to contribute with your own insights.
3.Getting top talent access
“If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room” the saying goes. Knowledge sharing helps you get feedback and help with your projects from those more skilled or with a different set of competences. You can always reach out to your peers – you’ll be amazed at what they can teach you in no time. Not to mention the access to upper management expertise!
4.Recognition
So many recent studies underline the importance of recognition at work – it is one of the most powerful motivators and will highly contribute to both employee retention and engagement. Sharing your knowledge with others will give your talents more exposure, thus giving the people you interact with the opportunity to identify you as a valuable expert. Helping others can help you build your reputation. And that is a valuable asset!

5.Generating new ideas
They say two heads think better than one. When different skills and experiences collide, eye- opening ideas and solutions emerge. The creative energy of brainstorming can generate faster and more relevant solutions to your current assignments, supporting you in successfully achieving your tasks. Tribal knowledge FTW!
6.Future leaders’ discovery
Sharing knowledge can be a great tool for everyone to PR themselves. All you need to do is to be permanently connected to the hot business topics and offer your expertise every time you can. When people are open to prove their value through their competence, it’s easier to notice the ones likely to organize people and to take initiative. The leaders of tomorrow are among those.
7.Limiting the skill gap
Your team is as strong as its weakest member. By sharing knowledge and talking about certain decisions and procedures, the new guys or juniors could easily acquire new sets of skills. Create an environment where everybody is encouraged to ask questions and help professionals in all your locations and job positions stay updated with the latest information in their field.

��8.Team cementing and silo breaking
Working as a team gives employees a sense of belonging. When employees, teams, and leaders share ideas and resources with each other, the feeling that they pursue a common goal becomes authentic. The feeling of being part of a functional and collaborative team boosts enthusiasm and empowers everyone to exchange knowledge, breaking down the silo mentality. This boosts employee morale and increases their work efficiency.
9.Sense of purpose
There is a thin line between employees “sort of doing stuff” and those that have a sense of purpose. By creating an environment where people feel like their knowledge makes a difference, they will clearly see how their work fits in the bigger mission of the organization. Work without purpose is no work at all.
10.Operational efficiency
That is perhaps the most important thing. Sharing knowledge increases the productivity of your team. You can work faster and smarter, as you get easier access to the internal resources and expertise within your organization. Projects don’t get delayed; people swimmingly get the information they need in order to do their jobs and your business fills the bill.
The “Knowledge is Power” adage is long dead as the new reality of the workforce has taught us that sharing knowledge is beneficial to everybody.
Moving one step ahead, I wonder how exciting it would be if we could also earn from our multiple skills!
HOW TO DO THIS AS AN INDIVIDUAL?
Helping others should be a natural extension of every capable individual’s responsibilities. Unfortunately, it does not come as easy as you would think. As privileged and able people, we often get too caught up in operations or our own problems to give people the help they need. However, in the last year, I’ve realized that most of my best clients, partners, and relationships have come from me helping someone for free and for a cost when required.
So how does someone share their multiple skills to the world? We’re all busy with our day-to- day lives, earning a living and eking an existence on Planet Earth.
But if you are willing, there is always some way. Helping others by sharing my multiple skills is something that brings me immense joy; hence I have shared 7 broad services which you can share with the world for free and for a cost:

1.Professional services (Consultants, Engineers, Marketers, Chefs etc.,)
There are professional service providers as a company, but we are focusing of individuals who have these skills to offer these services. May be, you are in job offering these services, still you would want the world to know your skills for others to connect with you to receive those services form you.
This is where a mobile app like nettworkk would help!.
2.Home repair (carpenters, Roofers, Electricians, etc.,)
In this ‘aggregators’ age, we have aggregators most services including food, taxi, products(amazon.com) and home repair services. Though these app provide customers with more options to choose from, the huge commission these aggregators take from the service providers really hits big on them.
An app like nettworkk connects customers directly to you instead of them coming through aggregators.
3.Software Services (Product managers, Solution architects, Developers. Testers etc.,)
Most of the college student eye a software job during college. Hope you agree. If you are trained in the latest software and aptitude skills, there are more chances of you getting through the campus interviews. So, there is always a huge availability of software professionals, testers and currently product managers. Interestingly, there are professionals with multiple skills, say., they are proficient in Java platform, cloud architecture as well as in big data. But they can’t be handling projects in all of them. They could only go by what their company project demands.
It would be great if they could have a platform like nettworkk which could help them connect with people who are looking for people with these skills to offer projects.
4.Creative services (Writers, Graphic Designers, etc.,)
It takes real skills and talent to master creative skills. Most people get into these services with seer love and passion for arts. They love colours, literature, imagination, and a sense of WOW in their work.
The speciality of creativity is that it is the basis of all innovation. Creative services need not be limited to arts but could be applied to almost any work including Engineering, Carpentry, Education... you name it!
5. Personal care (hair stylists, massage therapists, etc.,)
Personal care services have always been close to individuals as we visit at least one personal care service in a month. Especially, working men and women. These services are always in demand and people who provide these services do it with love and care.
As they work physically close to the clients, they develop a sense of connect and client look to a particular service person if they get used to their service.
6.Health care (Doctors, Physio therapists, Nurses etc.,)
If these is a service which requires more inter connectivity with the community is Health care. As there are multiple disciplines in health care including various speciality Doctors, Physio therapists, Nurses, and various lab technicians, they all must be connected to refer the patients to the right specialists.
7.Coaching Services (Online coaching, Private tuition, Sports & Games etc.,)
The most steadily growing industry is the online coaching industry. Due to layoffs and insecure job environment, most of the professionals turn to online coaching to get themselves updated with the latest technologies, strategies, and other required skills.
Here I remember these famous words by American evangelist, Billy Graham who says: “We’re not cisterns made for hoarding. We’re channels made for sharing.” Obviously, what good is any skill if someone decides on hoarding it? The skill would die along with the person that hoards it and is not able to be passed on generation to generation.
Coaching service including sports & games have always been sort after wherever one needed expert guidance. Someone whom to they can go-to for re-evaluating themselves and fine tune their existing skills or learn new skills.

WHERE DOES NETTWORKK COME IN ALL THIS?
NETTWORKK provides you with a platform to share, showcase, and adapt skills with as ease as our day to day social media affairs. The steps for this are easy, create a profile, mention all the skills you can offer for free and for a cost and wanted services for free and for a cost.
NETTWORKK provides an easy connecting ground for people of all strata and ages to bond with each other based on their skills offered and wanted. And you get matched right on your mobile. No more advertisements in classifieds and social media ads!
Say., if you are software developer working in a software company, you are mostly like to introduce yourself as a software professional. What if you have multiple skills which you could offer for a cost. Say., you are also a competent chess player and you are willing to provide online chess training to people who are interested. You might not have thought about providing this service unless someone pokes you related to chess.
That is where a platform like nettworkk becomes essential. You can also offer free services, say., you are passionate about playing a music instrument, but not keen earning from it. You might keep you instrument playing passion live by teaching people for free or playing for free. Just to keep that passion… LIVE!
The most exciting feature of this nettworkk is that you can add as many as 10 skills which you can offer for a cost and 10 different skills which you can offer for free! Sounds exciting?
Start communicating and showcasing what you are good at, share it with the world and make a difference while you earn extra income!
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Teaching to RTFM
I think RTFM has its place. I know I’m not in the minority with this view, but it’s not exactly polite to talk about it. We have all started out on the other side of RTFM at some point, clueless and helpless, not knowing where to begin.
To be quite honest, I wasn’t told to RTFM that much, because I learned to program from books when I was 12, and I wished I could ask somebody for guidance. My father still knew BASIC from the late 70s and early 80s, and my teachers knew enough PASCAL to pass their own exams and then teach children how to use Microsoft Excel. There was nobody to turn to.
When I started learning Java from a book, I was very confused, and I learned many bad habits, idiosyncrasies of the book’s author that I stuck with because I didn’t understand what they meant. Then I bought a bigger, heavier book about Java, and I slowly learned to program. I learned programming in general and Java in particular at the same time. One textbook explained what classes in Java do, but not why you would use them, and the other textbook vacillated between treating OOP as a scary newfangled concept nobody understands but everybody has to use because of Java, and something you have to be familiar with already because the book assumed you already knew C, C++, BASIC and smalltalk.
I read the manual and I didn’t understand. What finally got me to understand OOP was ironically learning and reading code in Python. Unlike in Java and smalltalk, OOP in Python is optional. Although everything in Python is an object, the common Pythonic programming style is procedural, with OOP constructs used sparingly when they make sense. This finally let me understand what OOP is good for. No amount of contrived examples like “class PickUpTruck extends Car { ... }“ helped me understand OOP in Java.
The same thing can happen with classes, module systems, macros, build systems, version control systems, bug trackers, databases, and visual modelling languages like UML and FMC. They are all paradigms or technologies to manage complexity, and if I give a student a toy teaching example of a SQL database, multi-module program, or UML diagram, then the student will be confused rather than enlightened. If the complexity is missing from the example, then the benefit of using complexity-mitigating technology is not obvious.
That even goes for comments! What good are comments in a textbook example, with explanatory text already left and right of the code listing?
If I had a teacher who could explain OOP to me, things would have been so much easier. Eventually, I managed to learn what I needed to learn. Some things are much, much harder to learn if you can’t ask a teacher multiple clarificatory question in quick succession. It would be even better if your teacher asked you a couple of questions to drill down on which part you didn’t understand.
Nowadays, I see many questions on Discord, IRC, and forums from people who are just starting out learning to program. It’s a vast difference between learning Unity3D when you are already a programmer who shipped software in C++ and wrote games in Java, and learning programming, C#, game design, level design, shaders, 3D modelling, and the Unity3D Engine in one go.
If somebody asks a confused question online, the first order of business is to establish whether they are an expert or a confused beginner. That can sound confusing and condescending, but I often fear if I give a straight answer to a confused question, I do more harm than good.
When somebody asks “How do I iterate over the pixels in a pygame surface?“, I can give the straight answer, or three advanced answers with different performance characteristics. You probably want to use numPy and cache the results during level loading. Maybe you can also use numPy if it’s only an occasional thing, and you can stomach the dozens of megabytes of native code dependencies. You probably want to use OpenGL with a GLSL fragment shader if you do the thing every frame. If perchance you want to do palette-swaps only, then you can use the pygame palette handing functions rather than iterating over pixels and doing a dict look-up each time. Iterating over all the pixels in a pygame surface is slow. You can probably get away with it on a 16x16 sprite, but not on a 1920x1080 screenshot.
That’s not even the worst of it! I see confused questions by people who think they found a bug in a library/framework/engine, but actually they just don’t understand their own code, or they don’t understand the programming language. I see confused questions by people who don’t know what problem they are actually encountering, who don’t know what to Google.
These people don’t need to be told to RTFM. Either they already read the manual, but they don’t understand it, or they don’t even know which manual, or what to look for. They can’t be told to RTFM, but they can’t be given straight answers either. The best thing you can do is to ask “You’re new to this, aren’t you?“ and point them to a more basic tutorial. Or, if your time is worthless, you can decide to tutor them one-on-one over the Internet.
All these problems can combine into the worst possible scenario: Somebody asks on StackOverflow/IRC/the mailing list/Slack/Discord, because their teacher is not available, or told them to learn to RTFM and figure it out independently. These people can be high school students too intimidated by their teachers to ask questions, university students who can’t be bothered to attend lectures or wait for office hours, or junior programmers who are trying to impress their boss.
Figuring things out is a useful skill to have, but it’s not something you should rely on in a high school class. If you’re a teacher, don’t punish students for asking questions! And don’t expect students to bother strangers on the Internet to do your job for you. The best thing you can do to get students to RTFM is to answer their questions when they get stuck, so they get a good idea of what to look for, which terms to search for, what to ask on IRC.
If you want to teach your pupils to RTFM, you should at least follow up with them and point them in the right direction in case they get stuck trying to look up the answer, or if they don’t understand the text in the manual. Of course you can assign reading, but for some reason, some of your pupils will take this to mean that you refuse to explain the topic, so the only recourse is to ask strangers online.
And then the student comes back next week and asks even more confused questions, now that the next assignment is due, impossible to complete without having understood last week’s topic.
Around a third of confused newbie questions I see are from students who would rather not ask their teachers, not even those who post whole homework assignments.
Some people want us to stop saying RTFM online, ever. They also want us to stop saying “You’re new to this, aren’t you?“ or “Please take a step back and think about what you are trying to accomplish with this“. They all are too condescending. I’m not just trying to shift the blame away from open source projects and programmer online communities. Confused online questions sometimes have offline causes. These causes cannot be hyperlinked, retroactively screenshotted, and posted to twitter.
For all the talk of rudeness online, many students would rather ask questions here than at school. Maybe the problem lies in the classroom.
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Equity Literacy in Science
What is equity literacy? How can we as science teachers accomplish equity literacy?
Equity Literacy: The skills and dispositions that empower, support, and position individuals to recognize, respond to, and redress conditions that deny some students access to quality educational opportunities received and enjoyed by their peers, and in doing so, thus sustains equitable learning environments for all students and their families (Gorski, 2014)
Hi my name is Breanna, I am a graduate student at the University of Arizona studying to become a Middle School science teacher. The main focus of the M.Ed program offered by the UofA is on ensuring that the teachers that graduate from the program are equity literate, but what does that mean? Well you can look up the definition for equity literacy however there is not an exact definition that can sum up everything that entails equity literacy, thus below I have provided some of the information that I have found on the matter and how a science teacher can ensure they are Equity literate.
Equity literacy in a science class can seem as a bit of an abstract concept purely because the information and content that is taught tends to be very factual and matter of fact. So how do we address the equity literacy implications we face in the science classroom? Well the answer is not as clear and concise as a science teacher would like however the basic principles below can help point you in the right direction!
The information below was provided by the Equity Literacy Institute.
1. Ability to Recognize even the subtlest biases and inequities
notice subtle bias in learning materials and classroom interactions;
show curiosity about ways school policy and practice might disadvantage some students in unintentional (or intentional) ways; and
reject deficit views that outcome inequalities (like test score disparities) are the result of the cultures or mindsets of students of color, students experiencing poverty, or other marginalized-identity students.
2. Ability to Respond to biases and inequities in the immediate term
develop the facilitation skills and content knowledge necessary to intervene effectively when biases or inequities arise in a classroom or school;
cultivate in students the ability to analyze bias and inequity in classroom materials, classroom interactions, and school policies; and
foster conversations with colleagues about equity concerns in their schools.
3. Ability to Redress biases and inequities in the long term
advocate against inequitable school practices like racially or economically biased tracking and advocate for equitable practices;
never confuse celebrating diversity with equity, such as by responding to racial conflict with cultural celebrations; and
teach about sexism, poverty, racism, ableism, transphobia, and heterosexism
4. Ability to Create and Sustain bias-free and equitable classrooms, schools, and institutional cultures
express high expectations for through higher-order pedagogies;
consider how they assign homework and communicate with families, understanding that students have different levels of access to resources like computers and the Internet; and
prioritize consideration of the needs, challenges, and barriers experienced by students who are from marginalized groups in each discussion and each decision about classroom, school, or district policy and practice.
Additional resources on Equity Literacy in Science are provided below.
EQUITY AND DIVERSITY IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION
Ten Commitments for Equity-Literate Educators
Toward a Transformative Approach to Equity
Beyond Celebrating Diversity: 20 Things I Will Do to Be an Equitable Educator
20 Ways to Bring More Equity to Your Literacy Instruction
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"What I learned from my computer subject"
Based on what I have learned “computer” is an electronic device or machine which retrieve, store, process, and manipulate data. It has many uses especially the internet that in these days is a part of our lives. We also have tackled about the history of the computer. There are the parts of these and its uses.
I learned that more things about computer and it helps me a lot. I have learned how to use Powerpoint especially in homework and project making.
In internet, i learned about the search engine like the best example of its the “google” it is called “pure search engine” it also helps me a lot in doing my assignments and projects too, because I get the important information that I needed.
I also enjoy my knowledge that I’ve learned in social networking like Facebook, wherein I can post my pictures, I can have more friends and I can communicate to my other relatives in the other place.
We make our own blog, that we post our poems, essay and other articles that our own.
Because of our computer education I discovered the website called “you tube” that is my favorite because through this I can hear my favorite songs and I can watch videos that I want.
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How to find the best English language tutors Online.
Most of the world’s population speaks and understands the English language. English is the official language i n every corporate industry and school for children. Some people find it difficult to speak English because they don't have an English-speaking environment around them.
If you're looking for the right place to learn the English language online? Don’t worry, there are so many options to learn English online from native speakers and Evopry is one of them that will provide you with the best English language tutors.
Learning English online has become easier than ever with Evopry tutors. Learn with the comfort of your home. The old traditional classes and homework methods have gone by the time, today’s English language learning is focused more on practical applications and lessons for any proficiency level and age group.
Learn speaking, writing, and reading skills with Evopry tutors -
Evopry tutors have excellent resources to teach English. This is not just for those who are having trouble learning English⎼⎼⎼anyone can take advantage of resources to improve the English language.
Excellent professionals
No fixed time for study, choose a tutor according to your availability
The mode of lessons will be video call
How to use Evopry to schedule online English lessons?
The Internet is a wonderful place to find a tutor. On Evopry, it's easy to find someone to help you with your English writing and reading skills online. Its unique filtration can help you to search for English language tutors as per your requirements. You can search tutor as per your need:
Require help with assignments
Having trouble learning English
Have grammar questions
Would like help improving your pronunciation
Want to learn at a faster or more challenging pace
Want to get experience speaking to a native English speaker
You can register as a student by following these steps:
Step 1: To find the best English language tutor simply search on Google or other search engines www.evopry.com Step 2: Sign up as a student on Evopry, for this all you need to enter your valid email address & password.
Step 3: Log in with the same email address and password.
Step 4: Search English language tutor. A nice filtering system lets you find that really fits your requirements. Figure out the tutor per your budget or how much you’re willing to spend.
Step 5: You can do filtering by price, specialization, native speaker, place, skills, and availability.
Step 6: choose the tutor and get the benefit of your first free trial lesson, which really helps the tutor to put on the spot and give them a chance to really wow you with an attractive lesson plan.
Step 7: For direct booking, click on the Book Now button and schedule a lesson.
Step 8: Select Payment options: Debit or credit card and PayPal.
Step 9: Schedule a lesson with the tutor. You can access lessons on both laptop & mobile. Our specialist tutors will correct your mistakes, clarify your questions, help you practice English communication skills, expand your voice, help you deal with hesitation, and assist you every step of the way. Evopry tutors help you to focus on the skills you need personally.
Step 10: Once you have scheduled a lesson with the tutor, do not forget to send a message to the tutor via Evopry chat box and tell him or her:
What languages do you already speak?
Your current competence and challenges in the English language.
Why are you learning and your requirements?
How often do you plan to take lessons?
Your interests, if teachers can use it to design lessons that are more interesting and relevant to you.
Step 11: Be ready 5 minutes before the scheduled time
Make sure you have a good quality headphone set or in a suitable location without too much noise with a strong internet connection. Hire English language tutors Online.
Evopry not only helps to find English tutors but ensures that your lesson goes smoothly, by removing several barriers, like Evopry automatically calculates the time zone difference between you and your tutor, and updates you for lessons through mails. There are many tutor are looking for online tutoring jobs
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Online Learning Apps, Tools, and Resources That We Love
Are you looking for online learning apps, tools, and resources that you can use with your students? If so, we have you covered. Check out our list below. Let us know if there are any that we missed.
BlezGo – BlezGo is a learning management system that makes online learning accessible and interactive. It is a SaaS that manages e-learning, virtual classrooms, videos, and pre- and post-activities. BlezGo allows you to train and sell courses online in multiple batches.
Brainshare – Is an EdTech startup based in Uganda. The Startup has developed a web app that creates an online learning platform where teachers and students in Uganda can interact. The eLearning platform allows teachers to upload notes, teaching materials, and assignments. For students, it’s easy to access content anytime wherever they are, with or without the internet.
Moodle – Module is a free, open-source learning platform designed for educators, administrators, and learners. The system uses a robust, integrated, and secure platform to helps its users create personalized learning environments. The software can be downloaded onto the user’s web server.
Edheads– A high-quality online learning science package that meets state and national
requirements. It incorporates mathematics and a variety of games such as Simple Machines, Virtual Knee Surgery, Stem Cell Heart Repair, and so on. Collaborating with institutions and schools across the US, this app has received numerous web-based awards and delivers free service.
Edna – It is an online learning journal software for childcare professionals, nurseries, pre-schools classes. Edna keeps a record of all the children in your program. You can find and view children’s profiles quickly and easily, add information, children’s comments, and more to build informative and in-depth views. The software increases parent involvement and keeps them informed in real time.
Genius SIS for Virtual Schools – Genesis is a web-based student information system designed for K-12 schools, districts, states, and higher education institutions, especially online/virtual and blended schools. Genius was designed from scratch to support the needs of online learning environments, such as rolling enrollments and integration with multiple language management systems. On this platform, users can create reports, dashboards, email templates, and even fields. Genius centralizes registration and management for all tools needed to deliver training.
NextThought – This tool helps to transform the process of online learning. NextThought can be accessed from your mobile device or from a computer system. Its learning environment allows instructors to see all aspects of a user’s activity and measure his or her performance against the organization’s learning goals.
Noodle– Noodle is a search engine for materials about education; it makes online learning simpler and smarter by suggesting and connecting you with the right schools, service providers, education professionals, and materials that will support you in your journey. It delivers details about educational opportunities available to you in an intelligible form. You can compare schools using factors such as class population, alumni achievements, or financial strength. It also shares advice and reviews from students, teachers, and stakeholders— all the information you need from trusted sources, available in one location.
SimplyDigi LMS – SimplyDigi offers products and online learning solutions that engage and make online learning easy and accessible across any industry platform. With this system, users can operate their own state-of-the-art, branded, web-based, online learning portal. SimplyDigi gives clients the online tools they need to increase employee performance; lower error rates; enhance communication; and manage, track, evaluate, and refine all online learning content.
Udacity – Udacity is an online learning environment for university-level classes at a fraction of the cost of a traditional university. With a focus on Artificial Intelligence, technology, and business, all Udacity classes are hands-on and interactive. To help graduates succeed in their chosen careers, class projects are designed to mimic real-world activities and can be easily included in portfolios for future job searches. Udacity also provides career assistance to graduates, including resume reviews and interview prep.
Vuolearning – This is an online learning platform engineered to create and share courses in a mobile-friendly way. Features include real-time learning analytics, mobile-friendly, and cost-effective, which makes it a good fit for those who are new to the world of e-learning design and development.
WizIQ – This is an easy-to-use online learning platform with many critical features: virtual classroom; online course creation; tests and assessments; LMS e-commerce; and e-learning analytics for tutors, educational institutions, and organizations. With WizIQ, you can create and sell online courses, take your tutoring online, create MOOCs easily, deliver learning on the go, train your customers, and train your partners.
Coursera– This app is designed to help college students make the right choices when it is time to decide what courses they want to take in college. It helps to prevent waste of money. It also helps with the elimination of the course they don’t have interest in by providing free online courses beforehand.
Scratch– Scratch is a free open network made available by MIT to assist young folks in learning to think and reason systematically. Scratch makes room for students to design and share their coding work with others around the universe. It allows them to create stories, games, and animations to assist in sharing their vision with others on the platform. On this platform, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations and share your design with others in the online community.
DigitalEd– Helps online educators in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to make learning better for students. With Maple
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, providing mathematical back-up, DigitalEd creates an efficient platform for online math-based education.
Blossom Educational – This is intuitive, comprehensive online learning, assessment, and management software designed for early education centers. It improves learning experiences for nursery children and creates responsive communication channels between parents and teachers. It also records children’s behavior and attitude toward various aspects of their school experience.
GeoGebra– GeoGebra comes with an easy-to-use interface and many features that help you create, modify, and share math simulations and models. It comes with multiple platforms and dynamic math software that brings together tables, graphing, geometry, algebra, calculus, and statistics in a free easy-to-use package. The app also comes with free and open source software; it has received many educational software awards in the US and Europe.
Lynda.com– Lynda is a website for learning how to edit any form of media. With over 2,100 courses, you can learn skills such as photo and song editing, 3-D animation, spreadsheet creation; with Lynda, you learn everything you need to know from the experts. All the courses are created by users who are extremely talented at or work in these fields. This means you get only the highest quality content made by people in the field, not people making cookie-cutter classes. Lynda is an extremely affordable website to join, especially when you consider the number of skills available.
Study.com – With over 25,000 video lessons and other resources, Study.com allows students to extend their knowledge of course content from home, or it can be incorporated into classroom lessons to meet student differentiation needs. There are options to take coursework for college credit, to receive homework help or complete study prep, and engage in professional development work. With videos ranging from the history of Sparta to working with fractions, Study.com can be used with students from K-12 and beyond. Any college credit earned is easily transferrable to over 1,500 U.S. colleges and universities. Teachers can enroll their classroom, assign videos and lessons, and even access printable resources such as worksheets designed to pair with video content.
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Are You Looking For Online Teaching Jobs – Join Applyteachingjobs
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Visual Basic Programming Assignment Help
Visual Basic Allocation Help
We are the best providers of Visual Basic course assistance that help students improve their grades by delivering quality visual basic tasks, homework, and projects. So far, our experts have performed more than 3400 Visual Basic tasks. We have an 85% recursive customer rate, which clearly proves the equality of the brand that we are providing in the allocation of the program. We promise to deliver a high-quality solution within the deadline for all orders, making us the largest online allocation assistant. Our visual basic assignment help experts are available 24/7 to provide A-grade solutions to students. We really are the most sought-after service among students. Before we talk about our services, we learn a few concepts of Visual Basics.
Overview of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)
Visual Basic is the third generation of programming language and integrated development environment, first developed by Microsoft. This language is developed from BASIC, which will enable web developers to build webpages using predefined tools, in addition to providing Rapid Application Development (RAD) with an attractive graphical user interface. This is a simple but interesting language that won't have complicated codes, and developers can pull and drop controls that are already defined. This is known as object-oriented programming language, which today teames up with .NET and calls it VisualBasic.NET. Visual basics are briefly referred to as VBA. This is a widely used programming language to develop software, application files, and ActiveKs control files. As with other programming languages, students completing computer science should work on Visual Basic tasks. Several elements that make this programming work include:
Structure of choice and repetition: Similar to other programming languages, loops and structures are important for deeper learning about the VBA. If / else i if / else / then there are several elements used in the selection structure.
Variables and Constants: Used to save different values. The variable values will change with the execution level, while the values associated with the constants will remain the same.
Operators and expressions: There is a wide range of operators that are used. Few include - <,>, < =,= =, < > yes, it is, it is not, etc.
Tools used for application design: VBA will offer you the tools you need to design apps and webpages without coding.
VBA deployments
Several popular VBA apps include:
Develop software and apps
Create files such as a .dll, .eke, and ActiveKs control
Design anything without coding and only by pulling and dropping features
You are dealing with a massive database, easy to manage DBMS with VB language and script
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The key features of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) are listed below:
It can be used to create software, applications, and databases
Compared to other programming languages, no or minimal coding is required
Coding is similar to coding on C and C + + and coding is easily understandable
There is no additional encoding because you have drag and drop features that perform all tasks
You can learn the basics of VBA from our Visual Basic task assistance experts.
Various topics for which our experts offer help to assign VBA
VB .Net themes:
The thread will enable the central processing to be divided into subprocesses, i.e. On two or more tasks performed in tandem. Threats are completely different from threats to processes. Basically, processes are fragments of a process. The process can also be initiated independently. When you develop an app that uses this programming language, amateur computer developers can create much or assume that the app will work efficiently. Few students will have difficulty fulfilling the task and will therefore struggle to achieve good grades. Send your task to us to take advantage of any help in visual basics.
Cloning objects:
Developers will clone projects to save time in executing projects. Cloning a data table is instead of creating one table from scratch, because you must first define new restrictions and then set the primary keys. All this is time-consuming. When objects are cloned in Visual Basics, developers can copy arrays of data while developing software. If you're a beginner on visual basis and don't have time to complete tasks, you can use our services to complete it with perfection. We have also experienced nimble helpers in Visual Basics who have extensive knowledge of different concepts of VBA for compiling tasks. Composed tasks can be used as teaching materials.
Socket:
Socket will promote efficient communication between customers and web servers that are connected to the same network. Socket will provide broad support for internet sharing in a computer network, as it acts as a point at which data is exchanged between the client and the web server software. For the server to communicate with the server on the client page, you should use the right port number. The challenge is for a computer student who is in the learning phase to create infinite loops that will allow you to assign the right port number to a network server. If you're having trouble writing tasks on sockers, you can seek help from our programming experts who are well aware of this theme.
Loop structures:
The loop will enable the software to perform multiple tasks over a specified period of time. The earnings calculation software will use the loop to post their employees' earnings into the account after every 30 days. There are many banks that will use time-block safes that will close without human intervention after bank hours. Loops will allow developers to run many code lines at the same time without having to type code lines again. If you find it difficult to work on a loop structure or don't have time to coding, then you can seek the help of our professional programmers to help with visual basics.
Data comparison and logical operators:
Comparing data will allow software developers to find similarities and differences between objects in the application source code. Logical operators use developers to sum up search results. For example, when you enter the best recipes for potatoes and tomatoes, you get the results of the best recipes for potatoes and tomatoes. Here, search engines use the "i" operator to extract results. Many developers will use logical operators to compare data when validating source code. This process takes up a lot of time. You can hire our Visual Basics project to help experts complete your task on this theme to perfection.
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Visual Basic is simple, but for many students it can be confusing. Many students describe it as programming prone to error and difficult to read. Below are the reasons why students are speaking to us for help with homework from Visual Basics.
Various topics such as loop structure, constants, and variables, etc. They are extremely difficult for students to understand and apply in homework tasks
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Mathematics and logical operators are difficult to spot and therefore students face problems in carrying out tasks
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Many students face difficulties writing a Visual Basic task due to a lack of knowledge and practice regarding various practical concepts. That's why we started offering Visual Basic assistance for applications or VBA homework assistance to college students at affordable prices. Our developers will use their knowledge and experience to write VBA codes that are well commented on and easily executed. We have a team of programmers who have graduated from distinguished universities and have a base of industrial experience for code writing and theoretical work. Every task solved by our experts is well structured and tailored to the requirements.
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Technologies and Our Kids

With most people plugged in all the time, My spouse and i often wonder what effect technology is having on our kids. Some say technology is another helpful learning system that is making our kids smarter and some say it is possessing no significant effect at all. Still, others propose that concept use is encouraging social isolation, increasing attentional trouble, encouraging unhealthy habits, and ultimately changing our heritage and the way humans interact. While there isn't a causal union between technology use and human development, I do feel some of the correlations are strong enough to encourage you to definitely limit your children's screen time. Is television genuinely that harmful to kids? Depending on the show and duration regarding watching, yes. Researchers have found that exposure to programs utilizing fast edits and scene cuts that flash unrealistically across the screen are associated with the development of attentional concerns in kids. As the brain becomes overwhelmed with shifting stimuli, it stops attending to any one thing not to mention starts zoning out. Too much exposure to these frenetic services gives the brain more practice passively accepting information while not deeply processing it. However , not all programs are damaging. Kids who watch slow paced television programs including Sesame Street are not as likely to develop attentional situations as kids who watch shows like The Power Use the e-cig Girls or Johnny Neutron. Educational shows are slower paced with fewer stimuli on the screen which gives youngsters the opportunity to practice attending to information. Children can then perform making connections between new and past knowledge, manipulating information in working memory, and problem solving. Effectively, a good rule of thumb is to limit television watching to an 60 minute block to two hours a day, and keep an eye out for a glossy-eyed transfixed gaze on your child's face. This is a sure indication that his or her brain has stopped focusing and it is most certainly time to shut off the tube so that he can start thinking about, creating, and making sense out of things again (all actions that grow rather than pacify the brain). If you do shut off the tube, don't be surprised if you have an important melt down on your hands. Tech blog has an addictive superior quality because it consistently activates the release of neurotransmitters which have been associated with pleasure and reward. There have been cases of harmful addictions to technology in children as young as four-years-old. Recently on Britain, a four-year-old girl was put into intensive therapy therapy for an iPad addiction! I'm sure you know how enjoyable it is to sign onto Facebook and see that reddish colored notification at the top of the screen, or even more directly how satisfying playing games on your computer can be as you accumulate more "accomplishments. " I am guilty of obsessive compulsively checking my Facebook or twitter, email, and blog throughout the day. The common answer to this challenges is, "All things in moderation. " While When i agree, moderation may be difficult for children to achieve like they do not possess the skills for self discipline and will sometimes take the easy route if not directed by an adult. In accordance with a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, children commit about 5 hours watching television and movies, 3 hrs on the internet, 1 1/2 hours texting on the phone, along with a 1/2 hour talking on the phone each day. That's essentially 75 hours of technology use each week, and Most probably these results are mediated by parental controls and surgery. Imagine how much technology children use when left in their own defenses! In a recent Huffington Post article, Doctor Larry Rosen summed it up well, "... we all see what happens if you don't limit these active participation. Your child continues to be reinforced in the highly engaging e-world, and more routine worlds, such as playing with toys or watching TV, pale when compared. " How are you ever going to get your child to read a black and white boring old book when they could use the flashy, rewarding iPad instead? Children on average spend 37 minutes or less each day reading. Do you see a goal problem here? With such frequent technology use, it is very important understand if technology use encourages or discourages healthier habits. It's reported that among heavy technology visitors, half get C's or lower in school. Light engineering users fair much better, only a quarter of them receiving minimal marks. There are many factors that could mediate the relationship between systems use and poor grades. One could be decreased time of sleep. Researchers from the Department of Family and also Community Health at the University of Maryland found who children who had three or more technological devices of their rooms got at least 45 minutes less sleep in comparison to the average child the same age. Another could be the attention conditions are correlated with frequent technology use. Going farther, multitasking, while considered a brilliant skill to have on the job, will be proving to be a hindrance to children. It is not uncommon to discover a school aged child using a laptop, cell phone, plus television while trying to also complete a homework assignment. If we look closer at the laptop, we might notice several tabs opened to various social networks and night-life sites, and the phone itself is a mini computer today. Thus, while multitasking, children are neglecting to give the studies full attention. This leads to a lack of active understanding, a failure to transfer information from short term to long lasting memory, which leads ultimately to poorer grades in college. Furthermore, it is next to impossible for a child to engage is a few of the higher order information processing skills such as making inferences and making connections between ideas when multitasking. We would like our children to be deep thinkers, creators, and innovators, not even passive information receptors who later regurgitate information with out really giving it good thought. Therefore , we should minimize access to multiple devices as well as limit duration of use. Get older comes into play when discussing the harmful effects of products. For children younger than two-years-old, frequent exposure to technological innovation can be dangerously detrimental as it limits the opportunities pertaining to interaction with the physical world. Children two-years-old and more youthful are in the sensorimotor stage. During this stage it is crucial construct y manipulate objects in the world with their bodies so that they can learn cause-effect relationships and object permanence. Object permanence is the knowning that when an object disappears from sight, it however exists. This reasoning requires the ability to hold visual representations of objects in the mind, a precursor to becoming familiar with visual subjects such as math later in life. To produce these skills, children need several opportunities every day to make sure you mold, create, and build using materials that do not need a predetermined structure or purpose. What a technological equipment provides are programs with a predetermined purpose that can be manipulated in limited ways with consequences that often won't fit the rules of the physical world. If the child seriously isn't being given a drawing app or the like, there're likely given programs that are in essence a lot like workbooks through structured activities. Researchers have found that such activities retard the cognitive development of children this age. Even while researchers advise parents to limit their baby's display screen time to 2 hours or less each day, I would tell you it's better to wait to introduce technology to your babies until after they have at least turned 3-years-old and are displaying healthy cognitive development. Even then, technology use could be limited enormously to provide toddlers with time to engage in creative play. Technology is changing the way children learn to start conversations and use communication to learn. Many parents are using equipment to quiet there children in the car, at the dining room table, or where ever social activities may occur. The risk obtain that the child is not witnessing and thinking about the social connections playing out before him. Children learn social proficiency through modeling their parents social interactions. Furthermore, paying attention to others communicate and talking to others is how infants learn to talk to themselves and be alone. The benefits of solitude just for children come from replaying and acting out conversations that were there or witnessed during the day, and this is how they ultimately be the better choice of their world. The bottom line is, the more we expose our children for you to technological devices, the worse their social skills as well as behavior will be. A Millennium Cohort Study that adhered to 19, 000 children found that, "those who watched more than three hours of television, videos or Digital video disc a day had a higher chance of conduct problems, emotional signs or symptoms and relationship problems by the time they were 7 compared with children who did not. " If you are going to give your kid screen privileges, at least set aside a time for just that, and use technology to pacify or preoccupy your children through social events. There's no question that technology use may result in poor outcomes, but technology itself is not to blame. Mom and dad need to remember their very important role as a mediator in between their children and the harmful effects of technology. Mothers and fathers should limit exposure to devices, discourage device multitasking, ensure devices are not used during social events, and screen the content that their child is engaging in (ie. Sesame Path vs . Johnny Neutron). Technology can be a very good learning resource, but children also need time to interact with objects from the real world, engage in imaginative play, socialize face-to-face with mates and adults, and children of all ages need isolation and time to let their mind wander. We need to fit more emphasis on the "Ah-ha! " moment that happens once our minds are free of distractions. For this reason alone, technologies use should be limited for all of us.
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People of WordPress: Mario Peshev

You’ve probably heard that WordPress is open source software, and may know that it’s created and run by volunteers. Enthusiasts share many examples of how WordPress has changed people’s lives for the better. In this monthly series, we share some of those lesser-known, amazing stories.
Computer science in the nineties

Mario Peshev
Mario has been hooked on computers ever since he got his first one in 1996. He started with digging into MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 first and learned tons by trial and error. Following that adventure, Mario built his first HTML site in 1999. He found development so exciting that he spent day and night learning QBasic and started working at the local PC game club. Mario got involved with several other things related to website administration (translating security bulletins, setting up simple sites, etc) and soon found the technology field was full of activities he really enjoyed.
The Corporate Lifestyle
Mario started studying programming including an intensive high-level course for C#, Java development, and software engineering, and eventually got a job in a corporate environment. He soon became a team lead there, managing all the planning and paperwork for their projects.
But he continued freelancing on the side. He grew his own network of technical experts through attending, volunteering at, and organizing conferences. He also ran a technical forum and regularly spoke at universities and enterprise companies.
Remote Working and Business Opportunity
The combination of a high workload and a daily three-hour-long commute made Mario’s life difficult. Many of his friends were still studying, traveling or unemployed. The blissful and calm lives they lived seemed like a fairy tale to him. And even while both his managers and his clients were abroad, he was unable to obtain permission to work remotely.
So Mario decided to leave his job and start freelancing full time. But he found he faced a massive challenge.
He discovered Java projects were pretty large and required an established team of people working together in an office. All job opportunities were on-site, and some even required relocation abroad. Certified Java programmers weren’t being hired on a remote basis.
As Mario had some PHP experience from previous jobs, he used this to start his freelance career. For his projects, he used both plain PHP and PHP frameworks like CakePHP and CodeIgniter.
For a while, Mario accepted work using commonly known platforms including Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress. In addition, he worked on PHP, Java, Python and some C# projects for a couple of years, after which he decided to switch to WordPress completely.
Building products
One of his projects involved a technically challenging charity backed by several international organizations. Unexpected shortages in the team put him in the technical lead position. As a result, Mario found himself planning the next phases, meeting with the client regularly, and renegotiating the terms. The team completed the project successfully, and after the launch, a TV campaign led millions of visitors to the website.
As a result of the successful launch, this client invited Mario to participate in more WordPress projects, including building a custom framework.
“I wasn’t that acquainted with WordPress back then. For me, a conventional person trained in architectural design patterns and best practices, WordPress seemed like an eccentric young hipster somewhere on the line between insane and genius at the same time. I had to spend a couple of months learning WordPress from the inside out.”
Mario Peshev
As his interest in WordPress grew, Mario stopped delivering other custom platforms, and converted clients to WordPress.
European Community

Mario presenting at a WordCamp
For Mario, one of the key selling points of WordPress was the international openness. He had previously been involved with other open source communities, some of which were US-focused. He felt they were more reliant on meeting people in person. With events only taking place in the US, this made building relationships much harder for people living in other countries.
While the WordPress project started out in the US, the WordPress community quickly globalized. Dozens of WordCamps and hundreds of Meetup events take place around the globe every year. All of these events bring a wide variety of people sharing their enthusiasm for WordPress together.
For Mario, the birth of WordCamp Europe was something magical. The fact that hundreds, and later on thousands, of people from all over the world gathered around the topic of WordPress speaks for itself. Mario has been involved with organizing WordCamp Europe twice (in 2014 and 2015).
“There’s nothing like meeting WordPress enthusiasts and professionals from more than 50 countries brainstorming and working together at a WordCamp. You simply have to be there to understand how powerful it all is.”
Mario Peshev
Growing businesses and teams
A key WordPress benefit is its popularity – an ever growing project currently powering more than 35% of the Internet [2020]. It’s popular enough to be a de facto standard for websites, platforms, e-commerce and blogs.
WordPress has a low barrier to entry. You can achieve a lot without being an expert, meaning most people can start gaining experience without having to spend years learning how to code. That also makes it easier to build businesses and teams.
“Being able to use a tool that is user-friendly, not overly complicated and easily extensible makes introducing it to team members faster and easier. It requires less time for adjustment, and as a result makes a team stronger and faster. The fact that this tool is cost-effective also allows more startups to enter the market. It requires less time and investments to launch an MVP. This boosts the entire ecosystem.”
Mario Peshev
Helping Others
Mario also introduced WordPress to children and young people. He taught them how to use WordPress as a tool for homework and class assignments. By using WordPress, they were able to learn the basics of designing themes, developing plugins, marketing statistics, social media, copywriting, and so much more. This approachable introduction to the software meant technical skills were not needed.
He was also part of a team of volunteers who helped a group of young people living at a foster home struggling to provide for themselves. The team taught the basic digital literacy skills necessary in the modern workplace and potentially pay for their rent and basic needs. This included working with Microsoft Word, Excel and WordPress, as well as some basic design and marketing skills.
“When you look at that from another perspective, a platform that could save lives – literally – and change the world for better is worth contributing to, in any possible manner.”
Mario Peshev
Contributing to the WordPress community
From the core team to supporting and organizing WordCamps, Mario has long been an active contributor to the global WordPress project. He is passionate about the connections fostered by people who are involved in building both the WordPress software and the community around it.
“The WordPress community consists of people of all race and color, living all around the world, working as teachers, developers, bloggers, designers, business owners. Let’s work together to help each other. Let’s stick together and show the world WordPress can help make it a better place.”
Mario Peshev
Contributors
Thanks to Alison Rothwell (@wpfiddlybits), Yvette Sonneveld (@yvettesonneveld), Abha Thakor (@webcommsat), Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe). Thank you to Mario Peshev (@nofearinc) for sharing his #ContributorStory.
This post is based on an article originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. HeroPress highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories would otherwise go unheard.
Meet more WordPress community members over at HeroPress.com!
Original source: https://wordpress.org/news/2020/04/people-of-wordpress-mario-peshev/
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Will the future of work be ethical?
Greg Epstein Contributor
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Greg M. Epstein is the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT, and the author of the New York Times bestselling book Good Without God. Described as a “godfather to the [humanist] movement” by The New York Times Magazine in recognition of his efforts to build inclusive, inspiring, and ethical communities for the nonreligious and allies, Greg was also named “one of the top faith and moral leaders in the United States” by Faithful Internet, a project of the United Church of Christ and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.
More posts by this contributor
‘People fix things. Tech doesn’t fix things.’
Silicon Valley’s competing philosophies on tech ethics with The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz
Meili Gupta is about to ask another question.
A poised and eloquent rising senior at elite boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy, Gupta, 17, is anything but the introverted, soft-spoken techie stereotype. She does, however, know as much about computer science as any high school student you’d ever meet. She even grew up faithfully reading the MIT Technology Review, the university’s flagship publication, which shows, because Meili is the most ubiquitous student attendee at EmTech Next, a conference the publication held on campus this past summer on AI, Machine Learning, and “the future of work.”
Ostensibly, the conference is an opportunity for executives and tech professionals to rub elbows while determining how next-generation technologies will shape our jobs and economy in the coming decades.
For me, the gathering feels more like an opportunity to have an existential crisis; I could even say a religious crisis, though I’m not just a confirmed atheist but a professional one as well. EmTech Next, as I experience it, is a referendum on what it means to be human at a time when tech is redefining how we relate to one another and to ourselves.
In short: will tomorrow’s leaders, despite good and ethical intentions, ultimately use their high-tech tools to exploit others ever more efficiently, or to find a better path forward?
But I’ll get to all of that in a little while, including why it’s so unusual for someone like me to even attend such a conference, much less with a press pass.
First, back to Gupta, who has come to the conference prepared. Not that she completed any conference-specific homework assignments in advance, it’s just that each time she steps up to the microphone to kick off a Q&A session with another thoughtfully composed and energetically delivered mini-inquiry into the fate of our most dynamic industries, she not only asks about the future of work, she embodies it.
“I grew up with a phone in my hand,” Gupta told me in an interview conducted during the conference, and “most people [in my classes] have covers for the cameras on their computers.”
As managing editor for Exeter’s STEM magazine Matter, she published thoughtful analyses of the ethical challenges inherent in issues like AI and climate change. It’s a topic she’s been interested in since she walked on campus — Gupta took the senior-level course “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” as a high-school freshman. She also took classes on and learned about self-driving cars and computer vision as well as setup an independent study on machine-learning algorithms. This fall, she began her senior year with a course called “Social Innovation Through Software Engineering,” in which students pick a local project and develop software towards doing social good. (Raise your hand if this resembles what you did with your teenage years).
And Meili does want to do “social good.” She considers tech ethics her generation’s job. She’s already well aware computer programmers need to learn to make less-biased algorithms, and knows this will require tech companies and the public to demand fairness and ethics. She wants to help address inequality, and is acutely aware of the irony that her superb education is the very embodiment of inequality.
After all, our social infrastructure allows, even cheerleads for certain people to learn so much more than others. It’s hardly news those same people are poised to dominate the future. What is noteworthy, however, is the rise of a class of people who are not only positioned to shape the future of the economy according to their will, but who simultaneously believe their own efforts will be necessary and sufficient to correct the injustices of that unequal future.
Students and alumni of elite institutions like Exeter, or MIT and Harvard (where I serve as a chaplain) are typically trained to see ourselves as generous, caring, and concerned citizens. We are not ignorant or callous to the suffering of others who are less fortunate, we tell ourselves. To the contrary, we are all about “service.” We will surely help others if — when — we succeed. Actually, it’s important we succeed as much as possible; only then will we have the resources necessary to help.
And yet, another narrative goes, we are also the best. We are special, exceptional, gifted. We aspire to inclusiveness. But we’re also still taught: be aggressive. Go out and win. Seize every opportunity.
What if we can only have one side of the coin?
The Student Winners Who Take All
Anand Giridharadas (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for WIRED25)
In his book Winners Take All, writer Anand Giridharadas critiques what he calls the religion of “win-winism”: the belief that the people whose ever-increasing domination of our social, economic, and political world are not only capable of fixing the problems of inequality and injustice their domination causes, but are in fact ideally positioned — by virtue of their victories — to be saviors and liberators to those who’ve lost.
Silicon Valley’s inequality machine: a conversation with Anand Giridharadas
Thus, you have Mark Zuckerberg championing freedom of expression as a core democratic belief while simultaneously undermining democracy by taking millions to publish false political ads. Or you have Marc Benioff proclaiming the end of capitalism and a new era of ethics while maintaining his own billionaire status and defending Salesforce’s support of ICE, even as undocumented children are separated from their families.
As we talk in an MIT Media Lab conference room, Gupta’s Chinese-born mother, who came to the U.S. just out of graduate school after student-led protests famously rocked Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, looks on, beaming with pride at her daughter’s obvious excellence.
Yet, what will the post-college experience be like for someone who developed technical and interpersonal skills like Gupta’s as a teen? After fifteen years at Harvard and MIT, I can tell you: people will throw jobs and money at her. I mean, you never know who will end up a billionaire, but she’s unlikely to end up sleeping in her car.
Or, let’s not make this about Gupta, whom I genuinely like and wish well. The bigger question is: Will the future of work be a dystopia in which thoughtful young people like Gupta tell themselves they want to save the world, but end up ruling the world instead? Or can the students now attending elite private schools and universities and conferences at MIT use their deftness with the master’s tools to dismantle their own house?
A Nonreligious Chaplain
Stepping back though, it might help to explain how a nonreligious chaplain even got involved in tech and the future of work in the first place.
I was a college religion major who thought about becoming a Buddhist or Taoist priest but ultimately got ordained as a rabbi and became clergy for the nonreligious (I’ve been the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University since 2005).
A decade ago, I wrote a book called Good Without God, about how millions of people live good, ethical, and meaningful lives without religion. Even so, I argued nonreligious people should learn from the ways religious communities build congregations to generate mutual support and inspiration. I squabbled publicly with fellow atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Lawrence Krauss over their aggressive condemnation of every aspect of religion, even the parts that inspire working people who haven’t had the extraordinary fortune to become as educated as them. And, attempting to focus on the positive rather than simply telling others what not to do, I then co-founded and led (until it closed last year) one of the world’s largest “godless congregations.”
“Good Without God” by the author.
Sounds completely unrelated to anything you came to this site to read about? If so you’re right, and that’s the point. Until recently, I’d never been involved in tech as anything beyond an enthusiastic — and at times addicted — consumer.
The Ethics Of Technology
Things began to evolve in early 2018, when I joined MIT’s Office of Religious Life (which soon changed its name to the Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life or ORSEL) as its Humanist Chaplain. The office also placed me into a new role called “Convener” for “Ethical Life,” asking me in other words to convene people across campus to reflect on how to live an ethical life from a secular perspective. Turns out, nonreligious ethics are important on a top tech campus like MIT, an institution so secular that only around 49 percent of its students consider themselves religious.
In the past, I might have declined MIT’s offer (my responsibilities at Harvard and elsewhere kept me busy enough, thank you very much). But, if I’m being honest, when I was asked to join, I was undergoing my own crisis of conscience. I’d begun to seriously question my own ethical vision.
No, I hadn’t found God (very funny). I had, however, discovered some serious flaws in the values I’d grown up with as a relatively privileged, straight, cis-gendered white man who believed in the power and virtue of American capitalism. That’s relatively privileged, by the way: my mom was a child refugee who came to the U.S. from Cuba with nothing. Both my parents attended community college, my dad never graduated, and the only money I got from him after he died when I was a teenager came from his Social Security checks.
Still, I realize now that I managed to grow up, do seven years of grad school, and start a decently prominent career around “ethics” without fully recognizing just how much of American culture and Western civilization is fundamentally unjust.
Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between The World and Me in 2015, I started thinking about how slavery was not only the moral evil I’d always considered it — it was the single. largest. industry. in the founding decades of American history. As the New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project” demonstrated, the political and economic exceptionalism of this country, which I embraced as the son of a refugee from a brutal Communist regime, was itself built entirely on a foundation of brutal oppression and exploitation.
“Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates
With Donald Trump’s election, I could no longer avoid the conclusion that white supremacy and kleptocracy are alive and well, here and now. Then came #YesAllWomen and #MeToo. Though I’d been raised as a proud feminist, I found myself reflecting on some of the harmful ways in which I’d been taught to be a man. Never admit vulnerability, except maybe privately and ashamed, to a woman on whom I was over-relying for emotional support. Be aggressive. Always win, because losers are the most valueless and wretched things on earth.
Like millions of others, I’d spent my life under the sway of a certain strain of American meritocracy which preaches a relatively secular but nonetheless fantastical dogma: that people like me are gifted, talented winners who should devote most of our energy in life to achieving as much personal success as humanly possible. And if all our winning and dominance ever starts to seem unfair, even a bit cruel or oppressive? No worries. We’ll justify it all by “giving back,” through community service or philanthropy or both.
That’s the level of cynicism and self-doubt I was experiencing when I got to MIT last year. Then one of my students noted, “if all companies started by MIT alums combined into a country, it’d be in the G20.” Most of my life, I’d have taken her comment as a point of pride. Instead, I began to realize: maybe places like this are the problem, simply by amassing so much of the world’s wealth and power that billions of people are left without virtually any.
Maybe people like me, proudly and too uncritically devoting ourselves to serving these places, are the problem.
In short, maybe I’m the problem.
Enter Giridharadas, the critic of contemporary capitalism, whose work was introduced to me last year by a Harvard Business School student. When Winners Take All came out last fall, it had students gasping as they read it in the halls of HBS before holiday break. A fast-talking, 38-year-old Indian American with an all-black wardrobe and a preternatural ability to go viral on Twitter, Giridharadas argues “we live in an age of staggering inequality that is fundamentally about a monopolizing of the future itself,” as he told me for my first TechCrunch column in March.
“The winners of our age, the people who manage to be on the right side of an era of precipitous change and churn, have managed to build, operate, and maintain systems that siphon off most of the fruits of progress to them,” he continued. A true iconoclast, Giridharadas is utterly unapologetic in criticizing the biggest heroes of the past generation: business titans and philanthropists like Zuckerberg and Bill Gates who give away billions but, he argues, do so mainly to hide greed, exploitation, and the subversion of democracy.
Through his words, I saw myself and the status quo I had helped maintain by failing to criticize the structures in which I existed, and I felt ashamed. But unlike with the shame I felt as a young man internalizing toxic masculinity, I didn’t want to hide my feelings, repress them, or confess them only to my wife. I wanted to own them publicly and do something about them.
During this same time, I got acclimated at MIT and found myself almost obsessively drawn to reading about “the ethics of technology,” an emerging but amorphous field of study in which scholars, activists, policy makers, business leaders and others debate the societal ramifications of technological change.
Expert Panel: What even IS ‘tech ethics’?
Tech, after all, has become the ultimate secular religion. What else so shapes today’s values (innovation is always good!); requires daily rituals (in ancient times, we prayed when we awoke, when we went to sleep, and throughout each day; that is now called, “checking our phones”); offers abundant prophets (VC’s, TED talkers, and what The New York Times writer Mike Isaac aptly calls “The Cult of the Founder”); and maybe even deities (as in the semi-disgraced tech hero Anthony Levandowski’s seemingly sincere attempt to found a church worshipping the AI God of the future)?
Entire subway car mesmerized by small gizmo clutched in hand. Some sort of worship? pic.twitter.com/CFdsSWJII6
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) October 8, 2019
Whether we think of tech like a religion or an “industry” (though what industry isn’t technology-based today?), it’s clearly causing terrible suffering and division. Uber and Lyft mobilize millions of drivers worldwide, and perhaps the majority make poverty wages. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook “democratize” culture, empowering billions to post their opinions. To do so they design algorithms so intentionally addictive and inflammatory, the world seems to have lost much of the ability it was in the process of gaining to conduct free, fair elections that enfranchise minorities and working people. And giant data centers powering all this “world changing” AI are worse for the climate than hundreds of trans-Atlantic flights. I could go on.
So I began a column at TechCrunch and took a year-long sabbatical to study the ethics of technology, of which “the future of work” is part. Which brings us to this summer.
Feeling like an eager and anxious MIT student myself, I head to EmTech Next with my press pass and my first-ever assignment as a reporter. I’m anticipating juicy work, investigating the ethical stances of companies and speakers slated to be on hand at the conference.
Walking over, however, I realize I’m stuck on a more basic question. What exactly does the phrase “the future of work” even mean?
What even is “The Future of Work?”
The past decade has brought an explosion in books, articles, commissions, conventions, courses, and experts claiming to help determine “The Future of Work.” Influential ‘FoW’ authors have run think-tanks and universities, advocated for the disabled and disadvantaged, advised harried parents, and even run for major political office. Earlier this year, California Governor Gavin Newsom even announced a prestigious “Future of Work Commission,” the first of its kind to serve in such a statewide capacity.
In tech ethics circles, the phrase references a crucial subgenre in which some of the fiercest policy debates of our time rage: are the jobs tech companies create actually good for society? What will we do if/when robots take them? And how does changing our work also change how we think about our lives and our very humanity?
The phrase dates back over a century, perhaps coined by the ironically named British-Italian economic theorist L.G. Chiozza Money, who argued in “The Future of Work and Other Essays” that science had already solved “the problem of poverty” — if only humanity could get beyond the disorganization and waste characterizing competitive capitalism at the time (!).
More recently, a TIME cover story on “The Future of Work” from a decade ago helped popularize what we tend to mean by the phrase today. “Ten years ago,” it began, “Facebook didn’t exist. Ten years before that, we didn’t have the Web.” The sub-header asked, “Who knows what jobs will be born a decade from now?”
Time’s “The Future of Work” cover (May 25, 2009).
Convenient, because of course we now know exactly what jobs have been born.
TIME’s story featured ten predictions: tech would top finance as the leading employer of elites; flexible schedules and women’s leadership rising; traditional offices and benefits declining. It’s not that the claims turned out to be egregious; but when you’re forecasting general trends, value lies in questions of nuance, like, “to what extent?” Sure, women made gains over the decade, but who would say they did to an acceptable degree?
Some more nuanced FoW books, like The Second Machine Age, by MIT Professors Erik Brynjolffson and Andrew McAfee, take the optimistic perspective on tech — that “brilliant machines” will soon help create a world of abundant progress, exemplified by the success of Instagram and the billionaires that company and its business model created. But Brynjolffson and McAfee compare Instagram to Kodak, without offering solutions to the problem that Kodak once employed 145,000 people in middle-class jobs, compared to a few thousand workers at Instagram.
“The Second Machine Age” by Erik Brynjolffson and Andrew McAfee
I would come to wonder, is philosophizing about “the future of work” just a way the richest, most influential people in the world convince themselves they care deeply about their employees, when what they’re doing is more like strategizing how to continue to be exorbitantly powerful in the decades to come?
“Diverging trajectories,” other euphemisms, and billionaire humanism
Well, yes.
A sleek new report by the McKinsey Global Institute, “The Future of Work in America,” emphasizes “diverging trajectories,” “different starting points,” “widening gaps,” the ‘concentration’ of growth, and other euphemisms for rising inequality that will almost certainly typify the near future of work, fueling growing anger and polarization. Their point is fairly clear: increased polarization means certain sectors like health and STEM are poised for big gains. Other fields like office support, manufacturing production, and food service jobs could be hit hard.
The “Shift Commission,” an initiative funded by now likely Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, produced another influential Future of Work report in 2017. In the Shift report, Bloomberg’s organization, in partnership with centrist think tank New America, emphasizes more future work for older people, concern about jobs in places that have been “left behind,” and general concern that the country’s economic dynamism might slow.
Michael Bloomberg (Photo by Yana Paskova/Getty Images)
The report describes four scenarios under which work in America might change in 10-20 years. Will there be more or less work, and will that work be mostly “jobs” in the traditional sense or “tasks” in the sense of projects, gigs, freelancing, on-demand work, etc.? Each scenario is named after a game: Rock Paper Scissors, King of the Castle, Jump Rope, and Go. Which reminds me of a certain Twitter meme:
Absolutely no one:
No one at all:
Literally no person:
The Shift Commission: “Hey, let’s make our deliberations over whether people will be able to find decent jobs a generation from now, or whether almost everyone but us will wind up in poverty, into a cutesy game!”
Sure, part of the “winning” strategy for doing business successfully has always been to have a little fun — and do a little good — while setting the rules of the competition heavily in one’s own favor. But will the different possible outcomes of the future of work be perceived as ‘fun and games’ by the losers of those games as much as by the victors?
The Shift report, Bloomberg wrote, aimed to “strip away the hyperbole and the doomsday tone that so often characterize the discussion of [the future of work,]” but the report’s tone and content have problems of their own.
Organizers highlight a survey finding “only people who make $150,000 a year or more say they value doing work that is important to them. Everyone else prioritizes an income that is stable and secure.” The basis for this conclusion? Given several choices to rank in terms of “What Matters Most to You About Work?” only the highest income bracket chose “doing things I feel are important” over “earning as stable and secure an income as possible.”
But if people are so scared of falling into destitution that they’ll prioritize security over meaning, that doesn’t mean we’ve suddenly discovered some Grand Truth about how only rich people would like to lead meaningful lives.
Via Shift Commission Report on Future of Work
Also, all the Shift/Bloomberg scenarios strike me as dystopian to some degree: all seemingly prophesize increasing screen addiction and competition for labor among everyone but an ultra-wealthy, ultra-educated elite continuing to gain power no matter which “game” becomes reality. None of the options is a more regulated, less unequal, dramatically more equitable future.
Which makes me think that all the various scenarios explored in the Shift, McKinsey, and other reports are just … scenarios, like when talk show hosts with thick Brooklyn or Bahstan accents break down who is definitely going to win next year’s Super Bowl or NBA Finals.
Now, I confess: instead of downloading the latest hip podcast from The New Yorker or Pineapple Street Media or wherever, in my free time, as I have since I was a kid, and like so many men, I listen to other men sitting around tawking spawts: guessing the betting lines, predicting the winners and losers, the MVP’s and the goats.
It’s a terrible hobby, but I’m basically addicted, though happily not to the sports gambling that underwrites a lot of my favorite sports talk shows. I don’t gamble myself, but I understand the appeal of betting on games and players and outcomes. And you don’t need to be a bookie in Vegas to understand why so many men like me spend our time this way: we want to know what will happen. We want to be prophets. We want to be in control. We want poetic justice. But we have no realistic way to get any of that, so we immerse ourselves in a kind of religious ritual of persuading ourselves we’re in control. A daily illusion, a form of alchemy, a pseudoscience.
Is VC the same thing? Is a lot of tech journalism? And even a fair bit of what passes for tech ethics?
I don’t know, but I do know that in addressing whether their various Future of Work scenarios will yield accurate predictions, Shift Commission organizers offer a typical FoW response. They quote John Kenneth Galbraith’s statement that, “We have two classes of forecasters: Those who don’t know — and those who don’t know they don’t know.”
Maybe what all of this underscores is that any hope most of us might have for a benign future of work is increasingly projected on to what I’ve come to think of as “billionaire humanism.”
Billionaire humanism is what happens when we say we value every human life as primal and equal, but in practice we are just fine if most humans suffer under the stress of every manner of precariousness, from birth to death, so a relative handful of humans can live lives of extraordinary freedom and luxury.
Billionaire humanism is a world in which, as Ghiridaradas pointed out to me for TechCrunch, we invent every manner of new shit, and yet life expectancy goes down, literacy goes down, and overall health and well-being decline. Billionaire humanism is when we experience that as our daily reality, yet we are expected to be grateful for “progress,” as if the current state of things is the best of all possible worlds and the future is sure to be as well. That’s why it’s appropriate to be angry when we contemplate these questions.
Which brings me back to Gupta. She was, when I spoke to her at MIT, feeling well aware that she was the future of work. For a high school student (or even if she were in her twenties), she shows such an impressive awareness of and interest in the ethical issues in AI and environmental policy-making.
But when I ask her what she wants to get out of attending EmTech Next, she replies, “I was hoping to learn some insight about what I may want to study in college. After that, what type of jobs do I want to pursue that are going to exist and be in demand and really interesting, that have an impact on other people?”
In other words, Gupta understandably also seems to want to know the future so she can control it. But is the idea to get a job that’s in-demand and interesting? Or one that makes an “impact?” Sure, one can dream of both, but what if one needs to choose more of one over the other? There’s a fundamental ambivalence to her response — a kind of agnosticism, a hedging of one’s bets, an “it depends.”
And if “it depends” is what studying and conferencing about the future of work ultimately boils down to, then it should not count as the kind of “important” undertaking the richest cohort in the Shift Commission study said it valued so much.
What Kind of Future, and For Whom?
David Autor via MIT Technology Review
As the EmTech Next conference begins, I’m as ambivalent as ever. We’re in the auditorium on the top floor of the newer of two buildings for MIT’s Media Lab (the famous “future factory” as it is widely known). The Media Lab building is such an impressive display of modern design and experimental robots-in-progress peeking out from behind glass lab walls stretching up to cathedral ceilings that even a trendily-dressed preadolescent girl roaming the halls with her father, a messy-haired worker here, can be overheard saying, “I love your work. It’s so cool in here…”
The conference’s opening speaker, MIT economics professor David Autor, is presenting on his latest paper, “Work of the Past, Work of the Future.” Autor studies displaced workers: non-college educated, mostly men in manufacturing who’ve endured what he calls the “shocks” of automation. These workers could once earn premium wages in big cities, which mitigated against toxic inequality but no longer, Autor explains. With most such jobs automated out of existence or outsourced to other countries, big cities have become concentrated havens of opportunity for richer, younger, healthier, and highly educated people.
Autor’s talk focuses on “rebuilding career pathways” for the less educated, which would be enormously invigorating, he says, for our sense of shared prosperity.
That’s unobjectionable, but peering through my Giridharadas lens I wonder, will the future of work, as economists like Autor envision it, involve a never-ending, enormous divide between haves and have-nots? Are band-aid solutions to market-driven inequality the best we can hope for? (Okay, maybe Autor is proposing minor surgery — but on a gaping, cancerous wound).
In a vacuum, it sounds appealing to give poorer workers more “training,” more “refined skill sets.” But such ideas tend to suck up whatever bandwidth the busy people at meetings like EmTech Next are willing to devote to thinking about social problems. So we get to feel good about our magnanimity for a couple of hours, then continue winning to an obscene degree, rather than ever substantively addressing the savage exploitation, racism, and greed at the heart of why people are poor in the first place.
The opening panel gets particularly depressing when it turns to Autor’s co-panelist Paul Osterman, a professor of human resources management at MIT’s Sloan business school. Osterman’s book Who Will Care For Us and his remarks here are on improving conditions for the millions of “direct care workers” (like nurses and aides) who will attend to aging Americans in the coming years. We need more and better training options for such workers, Osterman says.
Sure enough! But is THAT the big idea for the future of work? Improve opportunities to clean up after rich people like the ones attending this conference, when we get too old or sick to clean our own bodies? As I write this, I think of my dad, who grew up poor, never finished college, and tried hard but never “graduated” to a higher social class. “He had champagne taste, and a water budget,” his sister once told me about him many years after he died.
In the final weeks of his life, during my senior year of high school, dad sometimes needed my help getting his emaciated, cancer-stricken body to the toilet. The stress and sadness of that experience stuck with me for life; I have tremendous respect for people performing caring work professionally every day. But it is infuriating to hear a room full of bosses nodding: not only should millions more poor people do such jobs, it’s also a great opportunity for them. They should be grateful we’re planning out their future so brilliantly and thoughtfully.
And that’s what economists like Autor and Osterman, alongside an entire genus of similar thinkers, seem to me to be saying: that “we,” the ingenious few who control money and policy, are here to decide the fate of “they,” the poorer people who aren’t fortunate enough to be in the room with us today. By all means, let’s ease people’s suffering and “give back” to them.
But do we have a responsibility to actually bring them into the room with us to make decisions as equals?
The economics of real, structural change
The “future of work” ethos may be perfectly standard fare for the kind of economically centrist perspective to which I used to subscribe and which has characterized most of the U.S. Democratic party’s leadership since Bill Clinton’s ascendance. But it doesn’t represent what Elizabeth Warren has taken to calling “Big, Structural Change,” or what Bernie Sanders, hands akimbo, white hair and spittle flying, calls, “Revuhlooshun!”
Yes, let’s talk about how to pay health aides and construction workers a little better and how to “give back,” but by no means should we upend our economy to pay reparations, or tell the global rich to “take less,” as Giridharadas demands in his writing.
I talked with Autor just after the conference, and I admit part of me wanted him to make things simple by being a bad guy: sympathetic to the rich, condescending to the poor, a neoliberal hack making techies feel good about themselves by proposing partial solutions that don’t challenge power or privilege. It’s hard to pin him that way, though, and not just because he’s been wearing a gecko earring since he bought it in Berkeley with his wife decades ago.
Yes, Autor told me, he is a capitalist believer in market economies. Yes, labor unions have bashed his work at times, in a “knee-jerk” way he finds “super irritating.” But he sees improved dialogue of late, now that he’s come to believe organized labor needs a larger role in society. And labor leaders have “accepted that the world’s changed,” Autor says, “not just because of mean bosses and politicians … there are underlying economic forces that impact the work people do.”
Autor is also a Jewish liberal who spent three years worth of his own work time teaching computer skills to poor, mostly Black people as an early employee of GLIDE, a large United Methodist church in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district now famous for its 100-member gospel choir, LGBT-affirming attitude, and a community clinic serving thousands of homeless people each year from the church’s extensive basement. That’s not nothing.
The GLIDE Ensemble performs during a Celebration of Life Service held for the late San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee on December 17, 2017 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“I met twice with President Obama,” Autor proudly volunteers. So I figure I’ll ask him about Senator Warren, a prominent Presidential aspirant who literally lives in our neighborhood, and who is building her message around economic justice. Autor has also met with her. He likes her approach to antitrust regulation and consumer protection. But her proposal to pay off student loans is “dumb,” he says, because it will transfer too much money to the rich.
But is that our biggest concern when trying to make inclusive economic policy? All the rich people who are apparently taking out student loans?
Of course, my questions about Autor and Osterman are really about practically the entire field of economics. For generations, economists have asked us to take on faith that their unique genius can calibrate our financial system to advance prosperity and avoid collective ruin. But what about using that same genius to make the system itself more just and equal?
That, they say, is beyond their (or anyone’s) powers.
“Economics really is a branch of moral theology,” said the great tech critic Neil Postman, in promoting his 1992 book Technopoly, about how technology had (already!) become a religion and that America was becoming the first nation to adopt it as its official State Spirituality. “It should be taught more in divinity schools than in universities.”
What about Universal Basic Income?
Supporters of Democratic presidential candidate, entrepreneur Andrew Yang march outside of the Wells Fargo Arena before the start of the Liberty and Justice Celebration on November 01, 2019 in Des Moines, Iowa. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Martin Ford’s book The Rise of the Robots looks at the future of work less optimistically, lamenting that new industries will “rarely, if ever, be highly labor-intensive,” and ultimately calling for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) — a favorite solution of many tech leaders and future-of-work analysts alike, including Andrew Yang, the tech entrepreneur and unlikely top-tier Democratic presidential candidate.
Yang’s rise in popularity owes much to his identification with the tech community, including support from icons like Elon Musk. And in referring to his own prescribed version of UBI as the “Freedom Dividend,” Yang nods not only to ‘freedom,’ long a staple of presidential rhetoric on left and right, but also to the ‘dividends’ paid by companies to shareholders. At a time when some politicians propose ending capitalism as we know it, Yang’s language suggests remaking America in Big Tech’s image.
It’s tempting, for obvious reasons, to envision monthly thousand-dollar checks for millions of struggling Americans. Yet for all its fanfare, UBI does essentially nothing to address the metastasizing cancer of structural inequality in American society. Under the “freedom dividend,” the poor remain poor, while the rich almost certainly continue an inexorable upward march toward ever greater wealth. All of this would be essentially by design.
Think about the staggering inequality tech entrepreneurs have already overseen in and around Silicon Valley: homelessness, gentrification, and wage stagnation for all but the rich. That funneling of money to the wealthiest is not a bug in tech’s code. Economic exploitation was a core feature of Silicon Valley back in the 70’s and 80’s. It remains a core feature today.
The Freedom Dividend, in practice, will involve most Americans scraping by on (maybe!) a thousand more dollars a month, while elites gain ever firmer control over the entire world around them. That’s not identifying and creating structural change in the future of work.
A maddening feedback loop: the problem with “mission-driven” work
Karen Hao via MIT Technology Review
After the Autor and Osterman panels, I head out to interview Karen Hao, the AI reporter for the MIT Technology Review. Less than a decade out of her undergraduate degree at MIT, Hao writes mainly on the ethical implications of AI technologies and their impact on society, both in thoughtful articles and a snappy email newsletter, the Algorithm. Her sources and inspiration for stories are often her former dormmates and classmates.
She gravitated towards ethics stories because of a brief stint she’d had working at her dream job: a mission-driven tech company, at which, she told me, the founder and CEO was ousted by the board within months of Hao’s arrival, “because it was too mission driven and wasn’t making any profit.”
“That was a pretty big shakeup for me,” Hao said, “in realizing I don’t think I’m cut out to work in the private sector, because I am a very mission-driven person. It is not palatable for me to be working at a place that has to scale down their ambition or pivot their mission because of financial reasons.”
Hao’s comments got me thinking about the larger systems in which all of us who live and work in technology’s orbit seem to be trapped. We want to do good, but we also want to live well. Few of us imagine ourselves among the class that ought to intentionally step backward socio-economically so others might step forward. After all, there are tech executives who make $400,000 a year but still can’t afford their mortgages in Silicon Valley: should the revolution begin with them? But if not, just who does need to take personal responsibility for participating in oppressive systems of privilege?
Whatever the answers, Hao strikes me as sincere, smart, and well-intentioned, and I’m impressed she gravitated away from the moral compromise of the for-profit sector to her current role as a journalist, toward “mission-driven” work. But now that I’m not sitting with her as her chaplain but as a fellow journalist, should I dig deeper, question harder?
The MIT Technology Review, after all, might have something to gain from presenting a certain kind of tech coverage. There are advertising dollars and conference registration fees at stake, and it’s not difficult to imagine how these things might incentivize coverage that pulls punches. Attendees at a conference like EmTech Next might want to be challenged intellectually to think about ethics. But do they really want to hear, for two days straight, about perspectives that would cause them to question not only their own money-making abilities but also their moral character?
Granted, these are the risks one runs in trusting the coverage of virtually any issue at virtually any mass-media publication. And particularly after the despicable and anti-American treatment to which Donald Trump has subjected the press these past few years, I tend to give hard-working journalists such as Hao the benefit of the doubt. That said, how many costly errors in judgment at tech companies could have been avoided if tech coverage had been less fawning?
And one need only look down the road a few … actually not even a few steps from where Hao and I are sitting, to realize that sometimes even the most promising-seeming efforts to write about and study technology ethically are deeply flawed at best.
The exterior of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab/ (Photo by Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
After all, the gleaming Media Lab building, in which the conference took place, was under the direction of Joi Ito, a tech ethicist so legendary that when Barack Obama took the reins of an issue of Wired magazine as a guest editor in 2016 — as the sitting United States President — he asked to personally interview Ito about the future of artificial intelligence. Just two months or so after Hao and I sat there, news broke that Ito had cultivated a longtime relationship with none other than Jeffrey Epstein (no fucking relation, thank you), the notorious child molester and a ubiquitous figure in certain elite science, tech, and writing circles.
Joi Ito (Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for WIRED25)
Not only did Ito take at least half a million dollars in donations from Epstein against the objections (and ultimately the resignations) of star Media Lab faculty, he repeatedly visited Epstein’s homes. Epstein even invested over a million dollars in funds and companies Ito personally supported. “But forgiveness,” some friends and supporters of Ito’s might say. And on a personal, human level, I see their point. I’ve never met Ito; from what I’ve heard, I assume he’s a great guy in many ways. But he used his leadership role to closely associate with a convicted criminal and known serial sex trafficker of children, who, as one MIT student wrote, was part of “a global network of powerful individuals [who] have used their influence to secure their privilege at the expense of women’s bodies and lives.”
The MIT Media Lab controversy and getting back to ‘radical courage’, with Media Lab student Arwa Mboya
To Ito’s credit, he seems to have been devastated by the revelation of his fundraising choices (as he should be). But had the sources of tech funding been more scrutinized by the tech media earlier, would the entire situation have been less possible?
Maybe this entire saga of Jeffrey Epstein and the Media Lab seems less than fully related to the broader point I’m trying to make about how the “future of work,” as a genre of academic discussion, refers to a vicious cycle in which a few winners perpetually win at the expense of the rest of us losers, while casting themselves not as rich jerks but generous, thoughtful moral paragons. But that’s exactly what the Epstein story is about.
Consider, for example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose mission statement (at least in one iteration) states that it is “Guided by the belief that every life has equal value,” and that it “works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives.” This sounds great in theory, but what does it even mean in practice? Who decides what it looks like for every life to have “equal value?”
That last rhetorical question probably sounds pretentiously philosophical, and maybe it is. But it also has a concrete, literal answer: notwithstanding the important contributions of others like his father and wife, at the end of the day, Bill Gates decides on the direction of the foundation founded on his twelve-figure net worth.
When we think of Gates deciding how to promote the equal value of all lives, we must absolutely picture him deciding, despite the almost literal army of philanthropy consultants he would have had available to advise him otherwise, to meet cozily and honestly quite creepily with Jeffrey Epstein in 2011, long after Epstein was a convicted felon for such crimes. Where was Gates’ respect, in deciding to indulge in those meetings, for the equality and value of the lives of the girls Epstein victimized? They were vulnerable CHILDREN, as journalist Xeni Jardin points out, and Gates either knew this or willfully barrelled past a phalanx of experts who would have informed him.
Bill Gates has, to this point, escaped most criticism for his bizarre actions because of the “social good” his foundation does. And so we allow individuals like him to hoard the resources necessary to do such grand-scale charitable work. We could tax them much more and redistribute the proceeds to poor and exploited people, which might well eliminate the need for their charity in the first place. But we don’t. Why? Largely because of the belief that people like Gates are super-geniuses, which Gates’ involvement with Epstein would seem to disprove.
Then there is MIT more broadly. The Institute’s mission statement is “to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century,” but of course, it has a long history of advancing the production of weapons of mass destruction and of serving the military-industrial complex. The university’s newly-announced Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, set to be the first wing of MIT to require tech ethics coursework, is named after a donor who has close personal ties to Donald Trump, not to mention the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and, say, opposition to affordable housing.
MIT announces new college of computing with $1 billion commitment
It’s all a maddening feedback loop, in other words.
We continually entrust “special” individuals like Gates and Ito and institutions like MIT and Harvard with building a better future for all. We justify that trust with the myth that only they can save us from plagues to come, and then we are shocked — shocked — that they continually make decisions that seem to prioritize a better present … for themselves. Rinse. Repeat.
Of course, MIT is ultimately just a collection of people with incentives and feedback loops of their own. It supports the doing of great good as well. This is just to say that we can never afford to blindly trust tech coverage, tech ethicists, tech ethics conferences, or even tech ethics journalists slash atheist chaplains like me. There is too much money at stake, to name only one potential motivator for moral betrayal.
All of us who choose to involve ourselves with these industries, in the name of a better future, should have to live with skepticism, and prove ourselves daily through our actions.
“Show me your budget, and then I’ll tell you what your values are.”
Charles Isbell via MIT Technology Review
“There’s an old joke about organizations,” says Charles Isbell, the dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing and a star on the next EmTech Next panel, called ‘Responding to the Changing Nature of Work.’ “Don’t tell me what your values are, show me your budget and then I’ll tell you what your values are. Because you spend money on the things that you care about.”
Isbell is evangelizing Georgia Tech’s online master’s program in computer science, which boasts approximately 9,000 students, an astronomical number in the context of CS, and the program also has a much higher percentage of students of color than is typical for the field. It’s the result of philosophical decisions made at the university to create an online CS master’s degree treated as completely equal to on-campus training and to admit every student who has the potential to earn a degree, rather than making any attempt at “exclusivity” by rejecting worthy candidates. Isbell projected that in the coming years all of this may lead to a situation in which up to one in eight of all people in the US who hold a graduate degree in CS will have earned it at Georgia Tech.
Tall, dapper, and with the voice and speaking style of an NPR host, Isbell draws a long line of question-askers in the hallway after his panel (including Gupta of course, and me as well). He can’t promise to even open all the emails people want to send him, so he tells those with particularly good questions to fill in the subject line with a reference to one of his favorite 80’s hip-hop records.
Teaching ethics in computer science the right way with Georgia Tech’s Charles Isbell
In a brief one-on-one interview after he finishes with his session and the line of additional questioners, I ask Isbell to explain how he and his colleagues so successfully managed to create an inclusive model of higher education in tech, when most of the trends elsewhere are in the direction of greater exclusivity. His response sums up much of what I wish the bright minds of the future of work were willing to make a bigger priority: “We have to move to a world where your prestige comes from how much better you make [your students]. That means, accept every person you believe can succeed, then help them to succeed. And that’s the difference between equality and equity.”
“Equality,” Isbell continues, “is treat everyone the same, [not knowing whether] good things will obtain. Equity is about taking people who can get from here to there and putting them in a situation [to] actually succeed … without equity, you’re never going to generate the number of people we need in order to be successful, even purely from a selfish, change the economy, make the workforce stronger [point of view.]”
Maybe what we really need are conferences on the future of equity. What if the extraordinary talent, creativity, discipline, and skill that has been poured into the creation and advancement of technology these past few decades were instead applied to helping all people on earth to obtain at least a decent, free, dignified quality of life? Would we all be stuck on the iPhone 1, or even the Model T?
Perhaps, but I have to imagine if seven billion people were well-fed, educated, and cared for enough to not have to worry constantly about their basic needs, they’d have reason to collaborate and capacity to innovate.
But now I’m philosophizing for sure. So I try to snap out of it by asking a concrete and focused follow-up question of my next interviewee, MIT Technology Review’s editor-in-chief Gideon Lichfield: does Lichfield see his publication’s role as bringing about the sort of equity Isbell is describing? Or is he content for his magazine to promote the toothless, status-quo “equality” of “opportunity” most tech leaders seem to have in mind when hawking “Big Ideas” like Universal Basic Income?
Gideon Lichfield via MIT Technology Review
Once I’ve finally pulled Lichfield aside for an in-conference private audience, I find myself straining to discuss my ideas without completely offending him. Maybe it’s his impeccably eclectic wardrobe: the European designer jacket with some sort of neon space-monster lapel pin reminds me of my childhood in New York City, trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the latest trends among kids who were either richer than me, or tougher, or both.
I don’t want to allow myself to be intimidated, but I also don’t want to sound naive about the business world he and I are both covering. And Lichfield is clearly no dummy about questions of justice and inequality; when he explains that a lot of people in his audience work at medium and large companies who have to think of the value of their investments and other “high-end decisions,” I can guess what might happen if he one day booked a conference speaker slate filled with nothing but Social Justice Warriors.
Still, I want to know how much responsibility he’s willing to take for his own role in creating a more just and equitable future of work. So I use my training as a chaplain, delivering a totally open-ended question, like we do when conducting what are called “psychosocial interviews” to figure out how a client thinks. Beyond all this talk of the future of work, I ask, “how will we know, in 20 or 30 years, that we’ve reached a better human future than the reality we have today?”
“Wow, this is tricky,” Lichfield responds. “I feel like this is a really controversial question.”
“It is,” I respond too quickly for anything but earnestness. “I’m asking you the most controversial question I can ask you.”
Lichfield eventually offers that if society’s “decision-making processes” were more accessible to poorer people, that would be a better future; because while “you could end up with disparities,” he says, “you will also end up with choice.” But does this fall short of the vision Isbell and his colleagues at Georgia Tech have expressed through their project of putting knowledge in the hands of far more people than can usually achieve it in our current system?
When I add my signature question, which I ask at the end of all of my TechCrunch interviews: “how optimistic are you about our shared human future?,” Lichfield gives me the most gloomy answer I’ve received in my over 40 interviews to date. “I’m not especially optimistic … In the very long term, you know, none of it matters. The species disappears. And I’m pretty pessimistic in the short term [as well.]”
After a brief disclaimer about how he might feel better about our prospects for the end of this century, we wrap up, and agree to chat again sometime. Yet I’m left with more ambivalence: Lichfield comes across to me as a likable guy who leads a smart and engaging publication and conference.
But how often do influential men (like me, too, at times!) use “likability” to deflect criticism, persuading you to trust their personalities instead of questioning their motives, not to mention their profits? Whether or not the point applies to Lichfield himself, it would certainly be a valid criticism of many rich executives and elite leaders who sponsor and attend conferences like this one, selling us (and themselves) on their virtue and goodness today even as they pave their own way toward even more global domination tomorrow.
The thing about ghosts is, it’s their job to haunt you
Mary Gray via MIT Technology Review
At the next big panel I attend, things turn dark. In a good way.
The session, entitled The Dark Side of On-Demand Work, is moderated by Hao, the AI reporter, and features Mary Gray, an anthropologist and tech researcher, and Prayag Narula, founder of the startup LeadGenius and one of the subjects of Gray’s book Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (co-authored with Siddharth Suri, a computer scientist).
“Gideon talked this morning about the best jobs and how to acquire more of them,” Hao says, quipping: “now we’ll talk about the worst jobs.”
The topic of the session is what Gray calls “on-demand platform knowledge work,” the kind of contract labor or “gig work” where the entire point is for the (now countless) people doing the labor to become invisible so as to make AI look more impressive than it currently is (not to mention so they remain in the sort of shadowy realm generally understood to be a lousy bargaining position for a living wage).
How ‘ghost work’ in Silicon Valley pressures the workforce, with Mary Gray
We have no exact headcount for contract labor in the U.S., but it represents most of the growth in our economy in recent years, and is expected to be a $25 billion industry by 2020.
If gig work is the future, how will workers build careers? “You don’t become an Uber driver, then a Senior Uber Driver, then an Uber Manager,” cracks Narula, who was invited to speak because his company, which he admits employs ghost workers to track down business leads for busy executives, strives to pay a living wage. In some socialist utopia off in another dimension, a Chris Rock-like comedian would crack another joke: founders talk like they should get a cookie for paying living wages, when it’s literally the least they could do.
Here in this dimension, however, living wages for ghost work are still a big deal, worthy of MIT Media Lab stages. Which is probably why Gray, whom Narula says is more “communistic” than himself, supports eliminating distinctions between full time employees and contractors, along the lines of California’s recently passed “AB5” worker law, sparking potential for a progressive gig economy revolution. Gray wants to create a “labor commons” across the country, helping people live sustainable lives; she calls her book Ghost Work “the business case” for why and how we should do it.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signs gig worker bill AB-5 into law
We love to tout AI as the future of innovation, but what if we’ve deceived ourselves, with a combination of ghost work, tax evasion, and the like, into believing our present and future societies are much more advanced than the reality?
“Not Enough Value”
Kendall Square via Tim Pierce/Wikipedia
Heading home from the conference, I’m about to get on the Red Line train at MIT’s Kendall Square station when my “Charlie Card” metro pass buzzes loudly on the card reader: “Not Enough Value.” I am so immersed in my thoughts about what technology is doing to our values, for a second I honestly read the error message as a statement about my worth as a human being.
That probably sounds like a dad joke. I love a good dad joke, but it’s not. I’ve been working for many years, in therapy and the clinical supervision I do for my work as a chaplain, on an idea that I, like a lot of smart and highly accomplished people, internalized as a kid: that my worth or value as a human being is determined not by who I am but by what I accomplish.
The great psychotherapist Alice Miller, in her book The Drama of the Gifted Child, explains that though our parents may have loved us and taken wonderful care of us in many ways, they may also have sent us the subtle message that we are only really lovable if we are great. “You’re so smart,” parents may constantly tell their young children. “Look at how you won,” we then start saying to them, practically by preschool.
Our comments are well-intentioned, but what they convey is clear. We are what we do. We’re worthwhile because we’re outstanding. Which means: God help us if we aren’t. Children might intrinsically value kindness, curiosity, or loving relationships, but all too often we become obsessed with proving how great we are.
This “gifted child” mentality produces industriousness, to be sure; call it The Official Psychopathology of the Protestant Work Ethic. Left unexamined though, it leads us to constantly try to demonstrate our worth by out-working people, out-earning them, and out-greating them. We rarely stop to simply connect with other normal human beings or to allow ourselves to experience vulnerability.
Though it’s hard to feel warmth toward others while stuck in this mindset, we do need to constantly convey it. Because “winners,” remember, aren’t allowed to be naked sociopaths. They aren’t content simply to dominate the capitalist game, now and forever — they have to show you how likable they are while doing so. They have to show how deserving they are of their special status by “doing good,” not just making good.
So we end up with a company like WeWork, the shared office space company and symbol of an unethical tech future. In its recently filed IPO, WeWork said workers were yearning for a “re-invention of work.” Renters at WeWork offices were not clients or customers, but “members,” while neighboring workers were not just colleagues, but part of a “community.” Or so said Adam Neumann, only months before his platinum parachute cash-out, to the tune of $1-2 billion dollars, put the company he founded in such poor financial position that it couldn’t even afford to pay severance to thousands of laid-off employees.
Report: SoftBank is taking control of WeWork at an ~$8B valuation
Maybe the contrast between Neumann’s ridiculously communal language and his seeming rank selfishness is an extreme case, but it’s also fairly typical. In the elite social circles known for intellectual discussions of “the future of work,” it’s commonplace to use fancy language to to look not just important but heroic, even as our “innovation” disrupts lives and harms communities.
“How are we doing?” “Not very well.” On loving thy neighbor as thyself
I’m running late to the conference the next morning; I took a little more time playing one of my toddler son Axel’s favorite games: “jumping the shark,” over our living room couch. When Axel was born, I stepped back from my former life as an achievement-obsessed workaholic and encouraged my wife to embrace her busy law career. And not just for its steadier income — I love being Axel’s daily presence, trying to change every single diaper; entertaining his friends when I drop him off at daycare; and holding him tightly in my arms on long daily walks, discussing each new object along our way.
Prayag Narula via MIT Technology Review
Arriving at the Media Lab, I find Narula, who promised before his panel the previous day to describe how startups like his struggle to even attract venture capitalists to human-centered projects these days. He tells me about his friend with a similar business model — ghost work — but who, unlike Narula, doesn’t mention the “human factor” at all in pitches to VCs. The friend, far more successful at such pitches, once confided: “What I pitched to them is, ‘Hey, we are doing this today using people, but it will get automated in the future. And then because we have all this data, we will be the ones automating it.'”
When Narula asked, “do you really believe this can be automated?” his friend responded, “that doesn’t matter.”
“Our economy punishes people that rely on people,” Narula explains. “The education system and thought leaders have created this cascade effect of technologists not taking the human aspect of technology seriously.” I linger too long thinking about his story; now I’m even later for the first morning panel.
As I shuffle into the session, a discussion on the ethics of automation moderated by MIT Technology Review editor David Rotman, Rotman asks, “How are we doing?”
“Not very well,” says Pramod Khargonekar, a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of California.
On the panel with Khargonekar is Susan Winterberg, a fellow at the Harvard Belfer Center’s Technology and Public Purpose Project. Winterberg tells the story of Flint, Michigan’s famous exploitation of its poor, mostly people-of-color citizens, whose water was poisoned while their government abandoned them. Over 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, she then explains.
The Flint Water Plant tower. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
The number manages to make me the angriest I’ve been at the conference thus far. What can you even call a society whose vast majority doubts the future of their own work, while a small, comfortable minority lives in an almost literally different country? We don’t think of apartheid as something that could happen here, but that’s essentially what took place in Flint between April 2014 and…? Actually, as of this year, an estimated 2,500 lead service lines are still in place.
Winterberg’s talk pivots promisingly, however, to the story of how Nokia executives, including a former Prime Minister of Nokia’s native Finland, worked dutifully and creatively to help their own soon-to-be-displaced workers.
Winterberg’s story, published with Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher in a series of HBS case studies, begins in Germany in 2008. Nokia had closed a mobile-phone assembly plant in Germany that year, despite its record profits. The plant was not “cost competitive,” executives explained, with similar work being done in Eastern Europe or Asia.
Factory workers, politicians, and the German public were outraged, generating massive boycotts against Nokia. Unions organized people to ship their Nokia phones back to the company’s international headquarters in Finland. The anti-Nokia campaign cost €700 million in lost sales, Winterberg and Sucher found.
A few years later, after the smartphone revolution made it increasingly clear Nokia’s entire global phone manufacturing business would be decimated, company leadership chose not to abandon workers. Instead, it undertook a massive campaign to help employees cope with displacement, going so far as to stage career fairs and encourage other companies to hire its workers en masse. The campaign’s return on investment, according to the researchers’ analysis, was a thousand to one.
Photo by Josep Lago/AFP via Getty Images
“It’s their values, and it came from the very top of the company,” Winterberg tells me after her panel. “It came from the chairman of the board basically saying, ‘Find a way to do this that treats people with respect, that’s compatible with our values and will help us achieve the transformation we want to achieve, and report back.’”
Listening to her, I can’t help but wonder aloud: was Nokia able to model such solidarity (albeit only after failing in Germany three years earlier) thanks primarily to their roots in a homogenous and affluent society, where it’s a lot easier for management to identify with labor? “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” after all, has since Biblical times generally seemed to work out a lot better when racism and other forms of bigotry were not in play.
But, Winterberg reminds me, Nokia’s magnanimous response was also a global one. They had factories in China, the United States, and other far-flung locations, applying their “bridge program” basically universally. So I ask instead about her own background. From the Cincinnati area, she went to the University of Cincinnati as an undergraduate. There, she was deeply influenced by a field trip to urban Detroit, the degraded state of which made Winterberg want to know, “how could something like this happen?”
Moving on to a Masters in Urban Planning, then work as a researcher at Harvard, Winterberg came to understand the failures of the American Midwest in terms of a kind of unintentionally toxic coastal and economic elitism that has helped Donald Trump. “If you’re living in a small town and don’t have great tech skills,” she tells me, “your future is very dim. [My] presentation is designed to bring you to the experience of the more average person going through this and not just revert to your own experience where [mass layoffs are] basically just a bonus and an inconvenience for a couple of weeks. For most people, this is devastating and a lifelong change.”
Not everyone, in other words, can afford to view the future of work like a game, or from the relatively detached perspective of the typical attendee of a tech conference. And as Winterberg continued about Trump and right-wing populism more broadly, “He understands that from a political point of view. He’s been able to use that. We see that with politicians taking right-wing, populist stances across Europe. Brexit was a couple months before our elections here happened. It was the same thing.”
We’re all implicated, this makes me think. Not too many managers and executives intended to drive middle America into the arms of a Donald Trump. Certainly the centrist economic advisors in the Obama administration didn’t.
But we are all part of a system in which it is just too easy for people of means and privilege to glide along obliviously. It will take enormous, proactive, non-obvious action on our own part to avert disaster. But we’re stuck, deep in denial.
So I leave my conversation with Winterberg feeling sad: for our collective ignorance, and for the rarity of hopeful examples like 2011 Nokia.
To be fair
I find myself recharging as I talk, next, with Walter Erike. Erike, a mid-career independent management consultant also pursuing his MBA at Cornell’s Johnson School of Business, traveled from Philadelphia to attend EmTech Next, hoping to gain insights to inform his consulting business.
Erike, a Black man who spent much of his childhood in Harlem, is somewhat self-conscious about being a visible minority at the conference. But he’s also a dynamo of optimism and positivity.
“I don’t want to pile on MIT,” Erike tells me when I ask him how a conference like this, with a heavily white crowd, could be more relevant to other Black people in tech and related fields. “Because I don’t think it would be fair. But perhaps it would help if they were to reach out to the Urban League, reach out to the National Black MBA, reach out to the Consortium, reach out to NAAP, which is a national organization of Asians, to get more ethnic diversity in the room.”
Not inclined to linger on racial divides, Erike then steers the conversation to the idea of geographic diversity, echoing Winterberg’s concerns about the loss of manufacturing jobs in midwestern America. “If I hear many of the companies in the room, and if I consider where their headquarters are, we’re very West Coast, Silicon Valley focused, and New York, finance focused,” he notices. “There are a lot of really intelligent, motivated Americans living in the center, the Midwest, the breadbasket of America. From what I’ve heard and seen, they’re not represented.”
(My complete conversation with Walter, one of my favorite of the 40+ tech ethics interviews I’ve done for TechCrunch thus far, can be found here.)
Next I talk with Andrea Thomaz, CEO and Co-Founder of Diligent Robotics. Diligent’s signature invention, a robot prototype named Moxi, is roaming outside of the presentation room. Slightly resembling the maid Rosie the Robot in “The Jetsons,” Moxi is a person-sized presence designed to assist overworked hospital staff. Moxi’s typical day, Thomaz tells me, would be spent trailing doctors and nurses responsible for training it how and when to fetch medicines and other necessary supplies, so they can spend more time with patients.
‘Moxi’ of Diligent Robotics via MIT Technology Review
Thomaz’s product, in other words, may be just the sort of thing to force the cynical critic of AI and machine learning to throw up his or her hands and admit, “you got me.” Who is Moxi hurting? How is it not at least one small part of the solution to real human problems? And then there is Thomaz’s background as a relatively young woman CEO and founder in robotics, with a PhD from the MIT Media Lab and experience teaching at public schools; God knows we need more stories like hers. Like Erike, Narula, Gupta and others, she impresses me as sincere, smart, dedicated to her craft, and determined to pursue it ethically.
Maybe there’s a way towards technological advancement alongside true human decency. Maybe all is not lost yet?
Is ‘Get Hooked’ the Answer?
It’s time to shut the conference down: organizers are peeling “EmTech” logo decals off the walls, but I’m not ready to leave the Media Lab — I need a place to collect my thoughts. Will the work of the future bring ever-ballooning inequality under the guise of what is ultimately the slick, self-serving “philanthropy” of Billionaire Humanism and Winners Take All? Or will the good people I’ve met here at this conference prove not only to be exceptional, but the ethical and inspirational rule?
Bewildered, I begin to wander home. Uber or Lyft are the most efficient way to get from MIT to my house, but I’ve been researching and writing about the ways in which ridesharing is morally compromised. That’s out, given my current mood.
Even a train feels too fast, too claustrophobic, too … technological. So I walk the hour-long route, first through the sleek, monolithic beauty of MIT’s Kendall Square (“the most innovative square mile in the world”) and then through a sleepy industrial neighborhood of tow trucks, a defunct-seeming rail yard, and a multiethnic, working-class population (an area about to be transformed, to the tune of billions of investment dollars, by a coming extension of the Boston metro Green Line train).
Finally, I arrive at Bow Market, a crown jewel of my current home city of Somerville’s ambitious plans for sustainable modernization.
Bow Market opened in the spring of 2018 as a former storage facility turned semicircular courtyard for more than 30 local, independent restaurants, shops, galleries, and even a comedy club. The businesses are mostly women-owned, and the Market’s developers are proud of their nearly 30% minority and 20% non-cisgender owners, too. A quick walk through and you’ll find everything from hand-carved wooden pins of James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston to vintage heavy metal t-shirts and motorcycle gear, to grilled pickle pizza and a chocolate mousse in a small chocolate waffle cone that is literally the best thing I have eaten in my entire life.
I go in to Get Hooked, a Bow Market fish shop run by Jason Tucker, a stocky, six-foot-something, grey-bearded New England fisherman with a Bahstan accent. Tucker has a humble, folksy manner and a knack for delicate dishes of lightly marinated blueberry-sized cubes of melt-in-your mouth fish, alongside field greens, citrus, kosher sea salt, and brown rice.
He and his business partner Jimmy Rider started this shop, then partnered with Matt Baumann, a former “money lawyah,” in Jason’s gruff expression, who changed directions several years ago for a career smoking fish. From May to October, Tucker is out on Cape Cod Bay chasing striped bass, mackerel, bluefish, and tuna. And this particular summer Wednesday night, he’s here making $14 bowls for people like me. I take my tuna ceviche in compostable cardboard to a metal table adorned only by a small blue jar. Over the course of my meal, the jar lights up as a sparkly, solar-powered, dark-activated lantern.
The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, in a 2015 cover story, “A World Without Work,” examined growing research on America’s likely steep decline in jobs in the coming decades. Thompson tells, for example, the story of a 54-year-old writer, grandmother, and former university literature teacher in the post-industrial city of Youngstown, OH, who took a part-time job as a hostess at a cafe, just to stay afloat.
But he also discusses different possibilities, including one scenario he calls “The Artisan’s revenge”: Harvard economist Lawrence Katz’s vision of a world in which 3D printing machines create much of our basic infrastructure, leaving room for a new artisanal economy “geared around self-expression, where people do artistic things with their time.”
Is 3D printing the future of work? Photo by Manjunath Kiran/AFP via Getty Images
“In other words,” Thompson wrote, the future of work “would be a future not of consumption but of creativity, as technology returns the tools of the assembly line to individuals, democratizing the means of mass production.”
So is Get Hooked, and the entire Bow Market in which it sits, the answer? Local working people, applying their crafts with extraordinary artistry, at prices high enough to support a living wage but accessible enough to at least be a very occasional treat for other working-class people, while helping build a diverse, multiethnic, gender nonbinary, social-justice community where an entire city can come together to laugh, to celebrate, to eat, and to ponder important issues?
Or will it ultimately only be people like me, who have the enormous luck and fortune to afford homes in Somerville (current median single family house price: $799,000 and rising) and plunk down $20-plus for a light meal, who are able to enjoy this kind of “artisanal” and “community” experience “sustainably”? Am I doubling down on being part of the problem right now? I don’t know, but I can tell you which way I’m rooting, because that smoked fish is good.
Will the future of work be ethical?
I’m happy to admit I don’t know exactly what the future of work ought to be. I am developing my own ever-evolving understanding of what true human dignity and flourishing mean and what a healthier, less dystopian future might look like; I hope to elaborate on it later, including in a book I’ve recently begun to write.
For now, I can say a better future will demand emotional awareness and vulnerable courage from those currently in positions of power and privilege. We have to recognize that though we may not have caused these problems, we are responsible for them. Such a recognition is bound to be painful and confusing. It’s okay — wise, in fact — to not be able to face such a reality alone.
Why AI needs more social workers, with Columbia University’s Desmond Patton
This is why I wasn’t entirely kidding when I wrote that the entire tech industry could use a Chief Social Work Officer to help us cope with constant feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. Maybe more women in leadership across the board(s) will help too, as I’ve discussed with feminist tech philosopher Moira Wiegel.
On the Internet of Women with Moira Weigel
Wiegel argues that the internet has feminized our entire culture, and we need to embrace the positive aspects of such a change. If we do, maybe we can replace some of our tendency to grasp for power with the visceral joy of being on what tech critic and ethicist Douglas Rushkoff calls “Team Human.”
Douglas Rushkoff on ‘Team Human’ and fighting for our place in the future
Meanwhile, however, we don’t need a perfect prophecy for a better future to know that much of what passes for discussion of “the future of work” isn’t it. It’s obvious such discussions exclude and, in effect, dismiss the majority of humans who will have to actually live through that future.
It should also be obvious by now: if it takes a corrosively unequal future of work to maintain profit margins, maybe there needs to be a lot less profit.
I can hear the VC philosopher protest: “who decides how to re-distribute my money?” So, yes, of course, any re-distributive efforts to remake the future of human labor will be complex, flawed, and require enormously vigorous debate.
But the main point I’m trying to make is actually simple. You can have a massively unequal economy, or you can have an ethical one. But please don’t continue to insult us by claiming we can all have both.
If you want to be on the side of an even somewhat status quo distribution of work by those who “create” it to those who are supposedly lucky enough to receive it, you’re free to hold such a position. But then don’t be surprised when increasing millions (billions?) of people try to hold you and your position accountable by denying your efforts to portray yourself as a philanthropist and humanist who only has our best interests at heart.
Though you won’t hear much about it in the various reports and conferences, maybe the future of work is a lot more work stoppage. More protest movements, like the ones that brought 11 deaths and thousands of arrests in Chile, or the ones that mobilized nearly a million people into the streets of Hong Kong, also causing a dozen or more deaths. Maybe the future of work clogs American streets, making it harder to recruit top talent, bringing down IPO valuations. Maybe it gives way to more unions, across almost every kind of industry and sector. Maybe more Cooperatives. Maybe Neo-Luddism. Probably fewer billionaires by far. And a Green New Deal. In short, the future of work will quite possibly be conducted on a very different political and moral playing field than that of today.
Is this the only possible ethical vision? No, but the onus is on those currently in power to prove to the rest of us that another worthwhile possibility exists.
“Will the Future of Work be Ethical?” I ask Mary Gray in our post-conference interview, explaining that the question would likely be the title of this essay. “I love that ,” Gray responds. Philosophers answer questions with more questions; anthropologists compliment your questions and then go back to thinking about their own.
“But will it be?”
“I would say it can be,” Gray allows, “if we move towards imagining valuing the collective contributions of people and stop looking for a future of work that looks like the past. It’s not going to look like a better version of the past.”
I’ve kept in touch with Gupta a bit since the conference; we’ve even talked about me visiting Exeter and leading discussions with her and her fellow Matter students. She continues to seem genuine, thoughtful, committed, and of course brilliant. But I continue to worry it’s going to be nearly impossible for her, or at least for students like her, to resist some of the self-interest inherent in pursuing jobs that are “in-demand” (translation: big bucks) and have an “impact” (translation: allow us to feel good about our magnanimity and broad-mindedness with regard to the less fortunate, when really, it’s almost all about us and the profits we’ll make).
“Not everybody knows as much [about AI] as you do,” I tell her at one point. “I don’t.”
“You don’t?” she responds innocently. In the abstract, she understands how lucky she is, but comparing herself to a specific person like me is probably harder.
Maybe that slight lack of perspective on her own privilege is part of why Gupta is just too well positioned not to win. That is, unless she and many others actively and consciously choose a future in which they massively give up that privilege, walk away from economic domination, and hand many of their opportunities to others. There is not, as Giridharadas says, always going to be a “win win” the way we’re teaching students in places like Exeter.
“Hopefully more people saying we need to panic now. Personally, I am a little bit more relaxed about that,” Gupta tells me about the climate crisis she’s just spent a semester learning and writing all about.
“Let’s go to the future, yeah.”
The ethics of internet culture: a conversation with Taylor Lorenz
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