Remarkable Reading #46: CHANGING LANES: The Fair Go in the New Machine Age and INNOVATE! Transforming New Zealand's Technology Based Economy
The aim of this section Remarkable Reading is pay a tribute to the books that taught, share trends & insights into where our world in the 21st century is heading in a technology enabled world, and ask the right questions.
Bolded and italics quotes and references do not belong to myself and belong directly to the author. The focus is to share valuable insights and teachings from the book to win business for the authors.
Two Topics we will be touching on are:
1) Specific focus on New Zealand and trends within it's technology based economy
2) Specific trends within employment in Australia in a emerging technological age (have touched on components of this here and here).
Dr. Jim Chalmers (MP) and Mike Quigley (36 years of maverick expertise and experience of telecommunications) have written an accurate, descriptive, precise and detailed book about contemporary and modern changes happening in a rapidly emerging and evolving technological age. As we enter into a world of robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and as tasks and functions get more streamlined with automation, we run the risk of job losses. This will have a profound impact on the economy and will raise questions about what our roles and task will be in the workplace? What impact does this have on modern education?
I've worked in Australia across Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra and Perth almost 7 years and it was a rewarding and enrichening experience. Australia is a wonder of the world. Thriving and flourishing economy, robust and vibrant social scene, enigmatic and energetic shopping scene, spectacular scenery and gardens mixed with remarkable nature on one end, and a very modernistic city on the other fused with friendly and hospitable people.
CHANGING LANES: The Fair Go in the New Machine Age is a rare and insightful book about what changes governments, businesses and individuals need to understand and undertake in order to stay ahead of the curve in Australia. The elegance of the book is that it manages to educate you in a very simple manner on a profoundly complex topic yet still retains your engagement and attention in a authoratative manner.
Dr. Jim Chalmers (Labor MP) and Mike Quigley are both thorough experts within their respective areas as evident in their ability write CHANGING LANES: The Fair Go in the New Machine Age.
Their ability to guide you through a rapidly changing technological age clearly articulating the impact this will have on the country (Australia), your job, your lifestyle, the wider world economy and on social and cultural behavoural changes is what makes this book an absolute gem for people who are interested in understanding the impact of robotics, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the modern day employment & workforce within Australia, as well as their role, place and function within it. Right at the outset, CHANGING LANES: The Fair Go in the New Machine Age starts with "In writing this book together about technology and its impact on jobs in Australia, we both accept that technology will help us produce more goods and services, but as progressive people we also care deeply about how the economic gains are distributed"
Top take-out's include:
"Page 9 -We both believe that technology has been a huge boon to humanity, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Benefits include national electrical grids to power our increasing array of machines, global communications networks that allow us to communicate almost instantly, high-speed transport systems, antibiotics vaccines and sophisticated diagnostic tools that have seen steady increases in lifespans of most of the Western world"
Page 13 - "The challenge for government is to encourage the adoption and use of new technologies, and to ensure that Australia's ability to innovate and build new businesses is not diminished, while also promoting equality"
Page 26 - "For most people, employment is more than just the main source of income and the basis of material prosperity. It also meets important social and psychological needs, including a sense of identity and social status. Meaningful work is important to people's happiness and prosperity."
Page 40 and 41 - "A recent report by Deloitte shows employment in the UK grew by 23 percent between 1992 and 2014, but there were large shifts in job types, due not only to computerisation and communications but also to other technologies and globalisation. The report sounds a cautionary note:
If the pace of adoption of technology is accelerating, society will need to prepare for higher levels of technological unemployment. And the way in which change increasingly rewards high-level education and skills suggests that income inequality may yet widen. Rapid advances in technology mean that education, training, and the distribution of income are likely to be central to the political debate for many years to come.
Page 49 - "A common misconception is that AI and robotics technology needs to have advanced to a level where it can perform any cognitive task that a human can perform before it will have a significant effect on jobs."
Page 59 - "They predict that computerisation wil have the greatest impact, in thye near future, on low-skill and low-wage jobs. This not only means fewer jobs for lower-skilled workers; it could also have flow-on effects for those squeezed out of middle-skill and middle-income jobs and left to compete with low-skilled workers for a diminishing supply of lower-paid roles."
Page 66 - "Although the Australian economy and jobs are now dominated by the services sector, Australia is no less likely to be disrupted by automation or computerisation than other advanced Western economies.
Page 68 - "We cannot know whether it will be 10 percent or 40 percent of jobs in Australia lost to automation and computerisation over the next two decades. And even if it is at the higher end, the new technologies could lead to many new jobs - as has happened in the past with other major technology introductions."
Page 73 - "It is a remarkable achievement that Australia has maintained a record quarter-century of uninterrupted economic growth, especially when the period contained the biggest global downturn since the Great Depression."
Page 83 - "There is nothing wrong with creating wealth through innovation; it should be actively encouraged. And the rewards that come with it should flow through to innovators and inventors, as has happened in the past"
Page 91 - "The question is now whether we can again take the initiative and make the transition to ensure that Australia remains prosperous in a technology-dominated world. This is our generational challenge. Success will not happen by accident and we cannot depend on good fortune to get us through. As in the past, we will need to make our own luck"
Page 95 - "Similarly, the CSIRO gives six examples of jobs likely to be important in the future: data analysis, decision-support analysts, remote-controlled-vehicle-operators, customer experience experts, personalized preventative health helpers and online chaperones"
Page 116 - "This is why it is so important to ensure that all children, irrespective of their family circumstances, have the opportunity to master the basic skills of reading, writing and maths. To this list, we would now add computational thinking"
Page 130 - "But perhaps the biggest problem is that welfare without work doesn't guarantee happiness. Work is about more than earning money. It's about making a meaningful controbution, about teamwork, about motivation for education and self-improvement."
Page 143 - "Another way to restore the power balance between employer and employee would be to ensure workers share in the gains of the business they work for. The author of The Sharing Economy, Arun Sundararajan, argues for a decentralised form of capital - a crowd-based capitalism."
Page 145 - "One of the most radical policy suggestions has come from Nobel laureate and leading economist Robert Shiller, who proposes that governments should levy taxes on the robots themselves"
Richard Bentley's INNOVATE! Transforming New Zealand's Technology Based Economy is a extremely up-to-date, modern contemporary and very sophisticated book about what issues New Zealand needs to tackle in order to stay focused as a innovative, inventive, forward-thinking and competitive nation in a technological age. As someone who has grown up in New Zealand, it is a country that has got a tremendous and bright future, and with the right training, mentorship, leadership, training and cultivation, can deliver stupendous results in the ideation, invention and innovation sphere.
Well-informed and intelligent, INNOVATE! Transforming New Zealand's Technology Based Economy manages to inform readers in a superbly structured, well-researched, and extremely fluid book with a writing style that manages to ensure that readers are kept fully in the loop about technology in New Zealand, as well as New Zealand's economic history, strengths and positioning. It magnificently manages to clarify and unravel 15 independent sectors and hone in on each sector with extra insight on opportunities and improvements.
Right at the outset, Richard Bentley starts with "This book is about the state of our technology-based businesses and sectors, and how they can be assisted into a new period of growth and development."
The book is complicated, and the issues it tackles are relevant. Superbly placed with photo images that have been interspersed with the writing, INNOVATE! Transforming New Zealand's Technology Based Economy 's main function is to ensure that you are up-to-date on what New Zealand's current position is in terms of the new technology based economy, what it's doing to further strengthen it's position, what has happened in the past within the sector, and where we are headed moving forward. Despite being highly critical at times, the core focus is on progress and advancement.
I particularly enjoyed Richard Bentley's core focus on the individual sectors within technology including manufacturing, farming and education. How we need more technological focused hubs, and also the right education amongst those within the technology and start-up sector to ensure it's longitudinal success. The manner in that INNOVATE! Transforming New Zealand's Technology Based Economy reviews particular sectors with precision and detail is simply spectacular.
Top take-out's include:
Page 23 - "Innovation is taking ideas and making them happen. It's about turning ideas into money. Although to increase our wealth we need to be more innovative, the pressure from markets can only go so far in making businesses more innovative"
Page 25 -26 "We have one very good exemplar of a technology hub: the University of Auckland-hosted Product Accelerator. This is a vibrant and innovation-rich technology hub, funded by a long-term science grant, which brings together firms and scientists to develop and commercialize sophisticated materials and new manufacturing technologies"
Page 28 - "As the Minister of Finance said in his 2017 budget address, we aspire to be an "innovative, outward facing, hi-tech country, selling high-value products and services to the world"
Page 53 - "The game scene is especially buoyant and the New Zealand Game Developers Association estimates that interactive video game development, though not particularly large yet, is our fastest-growing creative industry and technical export sector with overseas earnings approaching $100 milion"
Page 53 - "Overall the creative industries - including games, music, books and especially the film and television sectors - add around $4 billion to GDP and directly employ nearly 20,000 people"
Page 59 - "The report also proposes that we need to maintain and develop the core digital skills and capabilities that are integral to functioning as a country, that will be increasingly central in supporting our wellbeing as a society and which are comprehensively integrated with major off-shore research resources"
Page 124 - "Business innovation is the process of developing new processes, products and services that aim to create profits. It is based on new technologies or by using existing information in novel ways. Innovation turns knowhow into wealth. Innovative economies are more productive and faster-growing"
Page 151 - "Creating a network of university-hosted virtual technology hubs that link researchers and research centres with businesses and entrepreneurs would go a long way toward resolving all the above issues. These hubs are places where businesses can obtain the best science and technology assistance."
In order to understand Asia-Pacific with thorough comprehension (as mentioned here), with a particular focus on New Zealand and Australia, it is important to note that CHANGING LANES: The Fair Go in the New Machine Age by Dr. Jim Chalmers (MP) and Mike Quigley and INNOVATE! Transforming New Zealand's Technology Based Economy written by Richard Bentley are both outstanding marvellous contributions.
You can purchase a copy of INNOVATE! Transforming New Zealand's Technology Based Economy here and visit Richard Bentley's website here.
You can purchase a copy of CHANGING LANES: The Fair Go in the New Machine Age here, or here, follow Jim Chalmers (MP) on Twitter here, follow Jim Chalmers (MP) website here, and view his profile here.
Thanking you kindly,
Praz aka Prashant
I've worked in Australia across Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra and Perth almost 7 years and it was a rewarding and enrichening experience. Australia is a wonder of the world. Thriving and flourishing economy, robust and vibrant social scene, enigmatic and energetic shopping scene, spectacular scenery and gardens mixed with remarkable nature on one end, and a very modernistic city on the other fused with friendly and hospitable people.
CHANGING LANES: The Fair Go in the New Machine Age is a rare and insightful book about what changes governments, businesses and individuals need to understand and undertake in order to stay ahead of the curve in Australia. The elegance of the book is that it manages to educate you in a very simple manner on a profoundly complex topic yet still retains your engagement and attention in a authoratative manner.
Dr. Jim Chalmers (Labor MP) and Mike Quigley are both thorough experts within their respective areas as evident in their ability write CHANGING LANES: The Fair Go in the New Machine Age.
Their ability to guide you through a rapidly changing technological age clearly articulating the impact this will have on the country (Australia), your job, your lifestyle, the wider world economy and on social and cultural behavoural changes is what makes this book an absolute gem for people who are interested in understanding the impact of robotics, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the modern day employment & workforce within Australia, as well as their role, place and function within it. Right at the outset, CHANGING LANES: The Fair Go in the New Machine Age starts with "In writing this book together about technology and its impact on jobs in Australia, we both accept that technology will help us produce more goods and services, but as progressive people we also care deeply about how the economic gains are distributed"
Top take-out's include:
"Page 9 -We both believe that technology has been a huge boon to humanity, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Benefits include national electrical grids to power our increasing array of machines, global communications networks that allow us to communicate almost instantly, high-speed transport systems, antibiotics vaccines and sophisticated diagnostic tools that have seen steady increases in lifespans of most of the Western world"
Page 13 - "The challenge for government is to encourage the adoption and use of new technologies, and to ensure that Australia's ability to innovate and build new businesses is not diminished, while also promoting equality"
Page 26 - "For most people, employment is more than just the main source of income and the basis of material prosperity. It also meets important social and psychological needs, including a sense of identity and social status. Meaningful work is important to people's happiness and prosperity."
Page 40 and 41 - "A recent report by Deloitte shows employment in the UK grew by 23 percent between 1992 and 2014, but there were large shifts in job types, due not only to computerisation and communications but also to other technologies and globalisation. The report sounds a cautionary note:
If the pace of adoption of technology is accelerating, society will need to prepare for higher levels of technological unemployment. And the way in which change increasingly rewards high-level education and skills suggests that income inequality may yet widen. Rapid advances in technology mean that education, training, and the distribution of income are likely to be central to the political debate for many years to come.
Page 49 - "A common misconception is that AI and robotics technology needs to have advanced to a level where it can perform any cognitive task that a human can perform before it will have a significant effect on jobs."
Page 59 - "They predict that computerisation wil have the greatest impact, in thye near future, on low-skill and low-wage jobs. This not only means fewer jobs for lower-skilled workers; it could also have flow-on effects for those squeezed out of middle-skill and middle-income jobs and left to compete with low-skilled workers for a diminishing supply of lower-paid roles."
Page 66 - "Although the Australian economy and jobs are now dominated by the services sector, Australia is no less likely to be disrupted by automation or computerisation than other advanced Western economies.
Page 68 - "We cannot know whether it will be 10 percent or 40 percent of jobs in Australia lost to automation and computerisation over the next two decades. And even if it is at the higher end, the new technologies could lead to many new jobs - as has happened in the past with other major technology introductions."
Page 73 - "It is a remarkable achievement that Australia has maintained a record quarter-century of uninterrupted economic growth, especially when the period contained the biggest global downturn since the Great Depression."
Page 83 - "There is nothing wrong with creating wealth through innovation; it should be actively encouraged. And the rewards that come with it should flow through to innovators and inventors, as has happened in the past"
Page 91 - "The question is now whether we can again take the initiative and make the transition to ensure that Australia remains prosperous in a technology-dominated world. This is our generational challenge. Success will not happen by accident and we cannot depend on good fortune to get us through. As in the past, we will need to make our own luck"
Page 95 - "Similarly, the CSIRO gives six examples of jobs likely to be important in the future: data analysis, decision-support analysts, remote-controlled-vehicle-operators, customer experience experts, personalized preventative health helpers and online chaperones"
Page 116 - "This is why it is so important to ensure that all children, irrespective of their family circumstances, have the opportunity to master the basic skills of reading, writing and maths. To this list, we would now add computational thinking"
Page 130 - "But perhaps the biggest problem is that welfare without work doesn't guarantee happiness. Work is about more than earning money. It's about making a meaningful controbution, about teamwork, about motivation for education and self-improvement."
Page 143 - "Another way to restore the power balance between employer and employee would be to ensure workers share in the gains of the business they work for. The author of The Sharing Economy, Arun Sundararajan, argues for a decentralised form of capital - a crowd-based capitalism."
Page 145 - "One of the most radical policy suggestions has come from Nobel laureate and leading economist Robert Shiller, who proposes that governments should levy taxes on the robots themselves"
Richard Bentley's INNOVATE! Transforming New Zealand's Technology Based Economy is a extremely up-to-date, modern contemporary and very sophisticated book about what issues New Zealand needs to tackle in order to stay focused as a innovative, inventive, forward-thinking and competitive nation in a technological age. As someone who has grown up in New Zealand, it is a country that has got a tremendous and bright future, and with the right training, mentorship, leadership, training and cultivation, can deliver stupendous results in the ideation, invention and innovation sphere.
Well-informed and intelligent, INNOVATE! Transforming New Zealand's Technology Based Economy manages to inform readers in a superbly structured, well-researched, and extremely fluid book with a writing style that manages to ensure that readers are kept fully in the loop about technology in New Zealand, as well as New Zealand's economic history, strengths and positioning. It magnificently manages to clarify and unravel 15 independent sectors and hone in on each sector with extra insight on opportunities and improvements.
Right at the outset, Richard Bentley starts with "This book is about the state of our technology-based businesses and sectors, and how they can be assisted into a new period of growth and development."
The book is complicated, and the issues it tackles are relevant. Superbly placed with photo images that have been interspersed with the writing, INNOVATE! Transforming New Zealand's Technology Based Economy 's main function is to ensure that you are up-to-date on what New Zealand's current position is in terms of the new technology based economy, what it's doing to further strengthen it's position, what has happened in the past within the sector, and where we are headed moving forward. Despite being highly critical at times, the core focus is on progress and advancement.
I particularly enjoyed Richard Bentley's core focus on the individual sectors within technology including manufacturing, farming and education. How we need more technological focused hubs, and also the right education amongst those within the technology and start-up sector to ensure it's longitudinal success. The manner in that INNOVATE! Transforming New Zealand's Technology Based Economy reviews particular sectors with precision and detail is simply spectacular.
Top take-out's include:
Page 23 - "Innovation is taking ideas and making them happen. It's about turning ideas into money. Although to increase our wealth we need to be more innovative, the pressure from markets can only go so far in making businesses more innovative"
Page 25 -26 "We have one very good exemplar of a technology hub: the University of Auckland-hosted Product Accelerator. This is a vibrant and innovation-rich technology hub, funded by a long-term science grant, which brings together firms and scientists to develop and commercialize sophisticated materials and new manufacturing technologies"
Page 28 - "As the Minister of Finance said in his 2017 budget address, we aspire to be an "innovative, outward facing, hi-tech country, selling high-value products and services to the world"
Page 53 - "The game scene is especially buoyant and the New Zealand Game Developers Association estimates that interactive video game development, though not particularly large yet, is our fastest-growing creative industry and technical export sector with overseas earnings approaching $100 milion"
Page 53 - "Overall the creative industries - including games, music, books and especially the film and television sectors - add around $4 billion to GDP and directly employ nearly 20,000 people"
Page 59 - "The report also proposes that we need to maintain and develop the core digital skills and capabilities that are integral to functioning as a country, that will be increasingly central in supporting our wellbeing as a society and which are comprehensively integrated with major off-shore research resources"
Page 124 - "Business innovation is the process of developing new processes, products and services that aim to create profits. It is based on new technologies or by using existing information in novel ways. Innovation turns knowhow into wealth. Innovative economies are more productive and faster-growing"
Page 151 - "Creating a network of university-hosted virtual technology hubs that link researchers and research centres with businesses and entrepreneurs would go a long way toward resolving all the above issues. These hubs are places where businesses can obtain the best science and technology assistance."
In order to understand Asia-Pacific with thorough comprehension (as mentioned here), with a particular focus on New Zealand and Australia, it is important to note that CHANGING LANES: The Fair Go in the New Machine Age by Dr. Jim Chalmers (MP) and Mike Quigley and INNOVATE! Transforming New Zealand's Technology Based Economy written by Richard Bentley are both outstanding marvellous contributions.
You can purchase a copy of INNOVATE! Transforming New Zealand's Technology Based Economy here and visit Richard Bentley's website here.
You can purchase a copy of CHANGING LANES: The Fair Go in the New Machine Age here, or here, follow Jim Chalmers (MP) on Twitter here, follow Jim Chalmers (MP) website here, and view his profile here.
Thanking you kindly,
Praz aka Prashant
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