Category: Purpose

  • Re-framing employment

    “For untold generations work was simply a matter of maintaining the status quo.”

    Across the world, the debates on productivity, reduced work hours, 4 day work weeks, DND after work hours etc are intensifying. Add to this the narratives of “the end of employment” and the “gig economy”, (and therefore the case against full time employment) and the signs of an upheaval of our concept of work seems imminent. I can vouch for that from my own experience as well – expressed to a certain extent in earlier posts –  The Entrepreneur & the Professional, and Re-skill. My posts on AI and its impact on employment are also related to this in a “bigger picture” way.

    It is personal in a different way too, because it’s increasingly an application of a broader life framework and worldview. In fact, I was accusing myself of over thinking this, until I read this fantastic piece – How Not to Let Work Explode Your Life. That’s where the quote at the start has been taken from. It traces the origin of the clashes we are facing in our work-life environments now to trends that have been forming for centuries. Long, fascinating read, and a confirmation of many of my complicated thoughts! (more…)

  • Money : AI :: Present : Future

    Thing

    I might have found a remedy for the Mad Men withdrawal symptoms. “Halt and Catch Fire” – that’s where the line is from. While the show has me glued, it also made me really consider the connection between money & AI.

    A key factor that is driving the increasing adoption of AI in the work context is efficiency. Somewhere in the equation of calculating efficiency lies money, and how much of it can be saved. I am ignoring ‘time’ for now, because even that, mostly comes down to “time is money”. Jobs increasingly become task oriented and the objective is to make each task more and more efficient. If we continue that way, the pessimistic AI future is easy to imagine – it will happen in a ‘frog in boiling water’ manner, but it will happen. (more…)

  • The redefinition of life

    This article about the man who was one-upping Darwin interested me a lot, because of the question he asked – What qualifies something as alive or not. His paper, currently under peer review, explains theoretically how, under certain physical circumstances, life could emerge from nonlife. Arguably, consciousness is the factor that separates life from non life. However, there’s also a new theory that proposes that consciousness is far less powerful than people believe, serving as a passive conduit rather than an active force that exerts control. The article compares it to the internet, and says that just like the internet can be used to discover, share, buy etc, it’s actually the person on the web/mobile who is actually deciding. It even argues that consciousness is not made to study itself.  (more…)

  • Dignity Gritty

    Amongst stories of soaring e-commerce valuations, this Mint story on Indiaplaza, and how it ran out of cash, was quite a sobering read. But it wasn’t the business angle that stuck with me long after I finished reading it. I somehow felt that all Mr.Vaitheeswaran was seeking, was a little dignity. I have no idea of what really happened, so I cannot comment on whether that is deserved or not.

    A few weekends ago, we were visited by someone who is a consultant for some work we needed done at home. She charged us Rs.2000 for a couple of hours, and after business was concluded, she spoke about how, a few years ago,  she had been a VP at a well known consultancy firm. Her current business, born out of her passion, was not doing well. She wanted to get back to work but was finding it extremely difficult to land a job. After she left, I wondered aloud to D, how she must feel, having to go to strangers’ houses on Sundays, and working for a compensation far below what she might have been earning. What would this experience be doing to her sense of dignity? (more…)

  • Currencies of hope

    In The Narratives of our lives, I had written about how, thanks to the advances of civilisation, many institutional narratives like religion, nation, culture etc have assumed increasing levels of importance in our lives, and how these (and our personal) narratives are probably our way of ensuring a sense of belonging. ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines‘, criticism on the concept of singularity notwithstanding, has convinced me on the cold, sanitised nature of evolution, so these days, I try to see what evolution’s play is, in these narratives.

    Thanks to a wine-induced pop philosophy conversation, I got thinking about theism and atheism. The epiphany (for me) was that they are just two sides of the same coin, and the currency was hope. Simply put, the foundation of the theist’s hope is God, and that of the atheist’s is the ability to determine his own future. ‘Our beliefs create the world we live in’, but across belief systems, hope is a critical ingredient for man’s survival. I realised that as long as we are the dominant species, hope has to hang around, or vice versa. By virtue of providing a common imaginary friend to a sufficiently high mass, religion not only addresses our need to belong, it also gives us hope. What each of us hope for is a very subjective thing, but collectively, it makes religion a really dominant narrative in many lives. When I thought about it, I recognised an even bigger force – money. (more…)