It has not been an easy week for many, many people out there. But for some, it has been the sort of bad week where one ends up on Friday wondering what exactly their next job is going to be.
Perhaps you used to be a recruiter at Instacart, or you were part of the “right-sizing” efforts at Snapchat.
Maybe you were once a Twitter executive, or you work for a “unicorn” where someone has uttered the following sentence in the last several weeks: “Wait, we’re now competing head-to-head with Amazon and Uber and Google?”
It’s at least possible you’re the guy whose job it was to tell Census Bureau Director John Thompson that his agency actually has been undercounting eCommerce figures by a whole lot for a long time.
Or maybe you’re American Apparel’s Dov Charney and your board has decided — and a judge has confirmed — that bankruptcy is less of a liability for the future success of the company you founded than you are.
With an international stock market gone wild, oil gone valueless and China’s magical growth engine just plain gone, the opening act of 2016 has not lacked for drama or casualties left in its wake.
There are plenty of ways to dwell on the doom and gloom — but as we at PYMNTS like to say, it’s always darkest before someone tests 10,000 filaments, connects them to the Internet, payment enables it and ignites some new connected IoT commerce device! So, instead of wondering what just happened, the better question that Silicon’s Valley’s walking wounded can ask themselves now is about what’s next.
Because as it turns out the world is now full of opportunities that even a decade ago would have seemed like the ramblings of a lunatic.
There is a use for a philosophy degree outside of a long career at Starbucks. And if you find that unbelievable, you might want to sit down, because you can now tell your parents (or expect your kids to tell you) with a straight face that a person can earn a near six-figure salary by babysitting a bunch of drugged out, naked computer programmers.
And if all that fails, you can join Star Fleet.
The crazy thing, only one of those is an exaggeration in any way.
Wanna know which one?
Parents everywhere working on a speech about why their college-aged son or daughter should skip the philosophy degree in favor of something STEM (because one offers a lucrative future in tech while the other involves food service) might want to work on that pitch a little.
As it turns out the tech firms of America, particularly the ones working on cars that drive themselves, need philosophers. And for reasons other than serving them coffee.
Self-driving cars have to make decisions (lots of them) in the course of taking their passenger from point A to point B — and many of those decisions involve safety. While the obvious move might seem to be to program the car for maximum safe operation (i.e. makes its No. 1 decision-making parameter to maximize its passengers’ safety), the obvious isn’t so obvious.
One can easily imagine a situation where the car makes a weirdly weighted decision — one course of action gives its user a 99 percent chance of survival, but drops the survival odds of the people in the other car to 40 percent. The other course of action brings its user’s safety down to 91 percent but brings the other car’s up to 90 percent.
If the car is just maximizing passenger safety, it will default to option one, which some people find a little morally questionable. But the alternative — programming self-driving cars to accept safety ranges for human passengers lower than the calculated maximum —isn’t a lot better. Most people won’t be overly enthused to purchase (or ride in) a car that has a less than 100 percent commitment to keeping them alive. Human cab drivers have a lot of problems, but one deciding to sacrifice themselves and you for the greater good is not one of them.
And this, believe it or not, is a situation that calls for someone with some very specific philosophical training: an ethicist. Ethicists are now working with tech firms in ever increasing numbers, as the technologists try to build thinking AI that makes the “right” moral call.
“The biggest ethical question is how quickly we move,” Bryant Walker-Smith, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina who studies the legal and social implications of self-driving cars, told MIT Technology Review. “We have a technology that potentially could save a lot of people, but is going to be imperfect and is going to kill.”
And while the issue is most prominent in self-driving cars, ethical questions and the opinions of ethics experts are becoming increasingly relevant. Granted, one’s Amazon Dash has relatively low odds of making a bad call and causing a tragic result, but it is still a machine using algorithmic decision-making as a substitute for human choice, sometimes on an automatic basis.
Programmers have largely made those decisions in the past, as they were the people who knew how to write the code that allowed the computer to “think.” Increasingly, as the computer starts to make more important choices, the decision is starting to involve people who know almost nothing about how to program a computer — but a lot about what to tell it to think about.
The United States Government May Pay Someone $90K/Year To Run Burning Man
Remarkable though it may seem, the United States federal government is hiring someone – and paying them $69,497 to $90,344 to be Burning Man’s Project Manager.
Yes that is the same federal government that does not seem to be able to guarantee clean drinking water for children, medical care for veterans, the accurate measurement of retail sales, functioning infrastructure or consumer protection that does not make life worse for consumers.
Good news — they are totally on top of making sure that a weeklong celebration of LSD, hedonism, cosplay and Silicon Valley networking is well run. Yay?
In fairness Google was more or less founded at Burning Man, so we guess there is a reasonable argument to be made that the Bureau of Land Management is doing their level best to protect America’s economic future.
According to reports, the job of the Project Manager “is to perform as project leader for complex projects such as RMPs, major EIS’s and EA’s and Special Recreation Permits, in particular the Burning Man event, which have a broad scope and often require coordination outside the district organization.”
Arranging private jet travel to and from the site is not explicitly mentioned in the job listing, but we imagine past experience wouldn’t hurt.
OK, You Can’t Really Join Star Fleet … Yet
But if Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk get their way, you might just have that option soon.
Of course the catch might be that you’ll have to deliver packages for Bezos as you tour the cosmos — and Musk may insist you drop him off on his native planet before boldly going where no one’s ever gone before.
The private race for space got a shot in the arm this week when Blue Origin — the Jeff Bezos-backed space transport firm — announced the successful launch and landing of a suborbital rocket that hit a max height of 63 miles over the Earth.
The rocket landed largely unharmed in Texas on Friday (Jan. 22). The rocket made the same trip in November.
The goal is to build a rocket that can actually get into orbit, return to Earth and then be reused. This would make space travel more accessible by lowering launch costs significantly.
“We’re already more than three years into development of our first orbital vehicle. Though it will be the small vehicle in our orbital family, it’s still many times larger than New Shepard,” Bezos wrote of the launch.
The Blue Origin launch follows the successful launch of a satellite for NASA by Musk’s SpaceX on Jan. 17.
The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base and performed well in flight.
However, it didn’t perform so well on landing: a leg on the rocket collapsed when it attempted to land on a barge floating in California, which caused the whole thing to fall over.
“Well, at least the pieces were bigger this time,” Musk noted on Twitter.
OK, so maybe make an interim plan — it may be a while before anyone is going anywhere on the Enterprise.
But then, we have cars to teach to behave and a national gathering of techno-libertarian party animals to protect, so we probably have the time.
We’re always on the lookout for opportunities to partner with innovators and disruptors.
Learn More