When everything is automated, how should we live?
In a world progressively embracing automation, the quintessential question arises: What should we do when machines undertake the tasks once pivotal to our daily existence? This seismic shift promises a future teeming with an unprecedented bounty of free time, nudging us toward a pivotal crossroad between technological advancement and human actualization.
Historically, our lives have been intricately entwined with our work, often defining our identity and sense of purpose. However, as automation steadily arrives within various sectors, from manufacturing to services, it liberates us from the traditional paradigm of 'living to work.' This liberation unfolds an opportunity to redefine our purpose and explore the realms of 'working to live,' where work is a choice, not a necessity for survival.
The newfound abundance of free time beckons us to engage in activities that foster personal growth, community involvement, and creative pursuits. It's an invitation to delve deeper into the arts, culture, and education. As machines take over routine and repetitive tasks, they free the human intellect to engage in complex problem-solving, innovation, and artistic creation. This transition could mark a renaissance of human creativity and intellectual pursuit, reminiscent of historical epochs where art, philosophy, and science flourished.
In an ideal world, increased automation signifies not just a shift in the labor market but a transformation in societal values. It encourages a society where leisure is not a luxury but a vital component of human existence, enabling individuals to explore their passions, cultivate hobbies, and engage in lifelong learning. The shift could foster a culture that values personal development, mental health, and well-being above materialistic gains.
However, this utopian vision comes with its challenges. The transition to a highly automated society necessitates the restructuring of socio-economic frameworks to ensure equitable distribution of wealth and resources. It requires educational systems to pivot towards nurturing creativity, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence, skills that machines cannot replicate.
Moreover, in this automated future, community engagement and social interaction become paramount. Human connection, empathy, and compassion cannot be automated. As we delegate tasks to machines, we must strengthen our social fabric, ensuring that technology serves as a bridge, not a barrier, to human connection.
As we stand on the brink of an automated era, our response should not be one of apprehension but of anticipation. This epochal shift offers a canvas to paint a new narrative for humanity, where the pursuit of knowledge, creativity, and human connection takes precedence. It's an opportunity to redefine success, not by the hours we work but by the quality of our lives and the depth of our human experiences. In embracing this change, we find not just the means to live but the inspiration to thrive.
What is backlinking?
Frustratingly, it can take a long time for search engines to start sending organic traffic to your website. Something that helps expedite this process are backlinks. Backlinking is a process of linking one website to another website. When a website links to another website, it is called a backlink. Backlinks are important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) because they help to increase the authority and credibility of a website.
When a website has many high-quality backlinks, it tells search engines that the website is popular and trustworthy. As a result, the website is more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), which can lead to more traffic and potentially more business for the website.
There are many ways that businesses can get backlinks to their website. One way is to reach out to local media outlets, online newspapers, and blogs and ask them to link to their website. This can be a great way to reach a new audience and increase the visibility of the website.
Another strategy for getting backlinks is to create high-quality content that other websites will want to link to. This could include blog posts, articles, infographics, or other types of content that are informative and valuable to readers. By creating valuable content, businesses can attract backlinks from other websites naturally, without having to reach out and ask for them.
Overall, backlinking is an important part of SEO because it helps to increase the authority and credibility of a website, which can lead to more traffic and potentially more business. By reaching out to local media outlets, online newspapers, and blogs and creating high-quality content, businesses can increase the number of backlinks to their website and reach a new audience.
What is Figma?
For anyone that doesn’t know how to code a website or app from scratch, that technical hurdle can be a limiting factor for your entrepreneurial endeavors. Luckily, in the age of no-code, tools like Figma exist. Figma is a cloud-based design and prototyping tool that enables users to create and collaborate on interactive designs for websites, mobile apps, and other digital products. It is a helpful tool for both designers and non-designers alike, as it offers a wide range of features and a user-friendly interface.
One of the main benefits of Figma is its collaborative nature. It allows multiple users to work on a single design project at the same time, enabling real-time collaboration and communication. This is particularly useful for companies that have distributed teams or need to work with clients and stakeholders remotely.
Figma also offers a range of design tools, including vector editing, prototyping, and design components, which make it a powerful tool for creating high-quality designs. It also integrates with other popular tools such as Slack, Trello, and JIRA, making it easy to incorporate into existing workflows.
Non-technical entrepreneurs can benefit from Figma in a number of ways. For example, they can use it to create wireframes, mockups, and prototypes to communicate their ideas to designers, developers, and other stakeholders. They can also use it to create and edit simple graphics and designs for marketing materials and social media posts.
In December 2020, Adobe announced that it had acquired Figma, making it a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of tools. This acquisition is expected to bring Figma's collaborative design capabilities to a wider audience and further integrate it with other Adobe products.
Overall, Figma is a valuable tool for anyone involved in the design and development process, including non-technical entrepreneurs. Its collaborative features, wide range of design tools, and integration with other popular tools make it a valuable addition to any team's toolkit.
How to learn from Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a platform created by Amazon that serves as a marketplace for small tasks that need to get done. If your business has thousands of hours of audio that you need transcribed. If your organization wants to double check the results of a computer vision experiment, against a third party, Amazon Mechanical Turk can show your data set to however many people you want to pay for validation. Amazon Mechanical Turk lets people list tasks, that may in the future be completed by artificial intelligence, to be completed by people that get paid for their work.
As Amazon describes, “Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually. This could include anything from conducting simple data validation and research to more subjective tasks like survey participation, content moderation, and more. MTurk enables companies to harness the collective intelligence, skills, and insights from a global workforce to streamline business processes, augment data collection and analysis, and accelerate machine learning development.
While technology continues to improve, there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as moderating content, performing data deduplication, or research. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce, which is time consuming, expensive and difficult to scale, or have gone undone. Crowdsourcing is a good way to break down a manual, time-consuming project into smaller, more manageable tasks to be completed by distributed workers over the Internet (also known as ‘microtasks’).”
How can your small or future new business learn from Amazon Mechanical Turk? The experience of someone listing a microtask on MTurk is as if an artificial intelligence was completing the work and reporting back to the creator of the job. The reality is that, based on the job specifications, Amazon took that information and listed it to a workforce, who then completed the task. This completed work is then sent back to the job creator, seamlessly and seemingly automatically.
This principle can be applied to many other technologies that people use every day. What is Uber but an app that connects someone to a driver, who then drives that person to where they want to go? What is AirBnb bus a website that shows you places in the real world that you can stay a weekend at? If you order groceries online, doesn’t that set off a local supply chain of people fulfilling that order?
If you aren’t familiar with technology or someone that codes, then technology can seem elusive and magical. Uber can seem like an impossibly difficult concept because of how novel it is to be able to request a taxi service on demand, when the previous non-tech version had such a difficult user experience. Airbnb can seem like an experience of wonder booked from your phone, teleporting you to a fully lived in environment, when you’re really just traveling in a new way. Ordering groceries online is so easy that you can forget that the simplicity is made by several people shopping, packaging and hand delivering your goods.
So what does this all mean for your business? If you’re a small business, a business that hasn’t started yet, or a not-yet-tech-enabled business, ask yourself this question: what simple tech can be used to make my business seem high tech?
If you’re a retail boutique on Main Street, you can very simply bring your live inventory online and make your physical store shoppable from anyone in your community’s computer or phone. If you’re a food truck with a knockout bestseller, you can create a subscription meal service for regular customers. Maybe you want to make a local marketplace for personal trainers, but don’t know how to code. Couldn’t you just make a webpage with an application form, hire trainers, then make an e-commerce website that lists the profiles of your new hires?
To tech enable your business, create a new tech platform, or just start a business online, you don’t have to have years of expert coding knowledge or a team of elite computer programmers on staff. A lot of the work has already been done by the people who made platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, social media, and the tools that work with these platforms. All you need to do is to be able to think about your business creatively, and ask yourself what you want to get done. Then break that down into tasks, and see what online tools are available to achieve those goals. If your business isn’t online yet, how are you going to start?