The Rise of the Freelance Workforce
NACo’s 2017 Annual Conference and Exposition, the Counties Futures Lab hosted a workshop on the gig economy and how the rise of the freelance workforce is affecting counties across the country. Providing their views on the Gig Economy are moderator Hon. Rich Fitzgerald, County Executive, Allegheny County, Pa., and presenter Dr. Trevor Brown, Dean of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University.
In 2016, The Hunger Games took the number five spot on the American Library Association most challenged books list. The reason for this stated: “They were banned due to insensitivity, offensive language, violence, anti-family, anti-ethic and occult/satanic.”
In 2014, the novel was also banned for reasons of inserted religious perspective. However, throughout the trilogy, a religious stance is never once mentioned by Katniss or any other character. The dominant belief throughout—the one in which Katniss dares to fight back—is that of loyalty to Panem and the suppression of the districts.
An important factor in the novels is “the nature of celebrity,” as clearly depicted in Bustle Magazine:
Celebrity has always been an important part of The Hunger Games. In the first installment, Katniss, Peeta, and the other tributes are transformed into glamorous idols before entering the Games’ slaughter, in an effort to glorify their actions for the Capitol’s benefit.
One has to wonder if reality is imitating art in the recent announcement by Snapchat promoting its new Spotlight feature. For those who recall the movie, spotlights were played on the combatants as they engaged in battle to the death. Instead of the Roman thumbs up or down to signal the Emperor's mercy for or condemnation of the beaten gladiator, a social media gladiator earns sustenance from a Spotlight submission based on how many unique views it receives compared
to other content submitted that day. Those who attain the most celebrity get to live big. Those who fail to attain enough celebrity must keep fighting or die trying.
Snapchat is paying out up to $1 million per day for users who submit the best content.
Snapchat is surfacing submitted content in a new section dedicated to Spotlight videos. Content is surfaced based on users’ individual preferences.
“We focus on serving the right Snaps to the right person at the right time. We do this by trying to understand your personal preferences.”
Snapchat’s algorithm also considers the following factors when curating content:
Before content is surfaced in Spotlight it gets reviewed by moderators to ensure it’s both appropriate and entertaining.
Snapchat notes it’s actively monitoring for fraud to ensure view counts are not artificially inflated.
Earnings will be paid out to users every day and Snapchat will send a direct message to notify people who are awarded a share of the money.
In each of these seven types of AI individual humans are the clients of the service they provide. Whether that service is as simple as activating a smoke detector alarm or as complex as porting raw knowledge directly into our brains, the focus is always on us as individuals. So what happens when AI evolves to the point where that focus is turned toward a more global perspective? Who will be empowered to set the rules for an extra-human system so powerful that it can impact any or all humans on planet earth? How might the influence of AI on human life grow over the next fifty years? What is the hidden value in that growth?
A distributed ledger is a consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data geographically spread across multiple sites, countries, or institutions. Unlike with a distributed database, there is no central administrator
Human
intelligence is so remarkable because it’s collaborative. The
social reservoir of knowledge is a result of intelligence interacting
with other intelligence. Having barriers between two intelligent systems
slows down growth because it inhibits connections from taking place.
The more connections that happen, the more intelligent something can
become. The more intelligent an AI system becomes, the more value it
has.
Several concerns have been raised about using distributed ledgers within government:
The model that’s beginning to take form is a world where data is a resource of increasing supply thanks to large data providers, IoT devices, and the Internet. The data can be leveraged by AI algorithms that refine it and use it to take intelligent actions in the real world. These actions are facilitated by DLT technology that connect everything together, trigger the reconciling of trade, and record it all in a shared ledger. Once the networks are put in place, they run themselves and can ever grow smarter over time. This is the fourth industrial revolution.
Recently, the NBC News segment “Growing Number of Cities Suspending Recycling Programs Over Rising Costs” showed the example of Casa Grande, Arizona as indicative of a downward trend prevalent among American cities.
The segment describes how cities are struggling to finance and maintain curbside recycling programs, especially now that China has stopped buying these materials. It also hints at how and why the end of such programs is problematic. Amid concerns about climate change, there is a real need to recycle, now more than ever.
This is yet another example of substituting Conventional Wisdom (CW) for Knowledge Based Decision Making (KBDM). CW advocates surmise that dumping our garbage in landfills and sites outside of town must be a good solution. That's the way it has been done for centuries. KBDM Advocates learn from scientific studies that landfills eventually emit toxic substances and dangerous bacteria into our air and our drinking water. They learn that people who live near landfills or former dump sites are statistically more prone to disease than those who don't. They also learn of the relationship between methane gas and global warming that scientists claim is the root cause of global climate change. Armed with this information and the knowledge that landfill sites are a major emitter of methane gas, they make recycling decisions that may not be popular but may save thousands of lives in the future.
Could it be that the Chinese Government is gradually making decisions based on verified knowledge while we are still operating from conventional wisdom?
Screen technologies are the base of everything that characterizes Generation Alpha and truly distinguishes them from every other generati...
