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Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Will Workers' Compensation Adapt to "On Demand" Employment

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google...
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google Inc. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The changing nature of employment status may have a profound effect on how workers' compensation exists, if at all, in the coming years. Today's post is shared from recode.net

What happens as machines and artificial intelligence push humans out of the workforce? It’s one of the more important problems of our time — theoretical as it may seem in some sectors today — as technology makes industry after industry more efficient.
One of the most important tech overlords, Google CEO Larry Page, thinks most people want to work, but they’d be happy working less.
Page’s take: We have enough resources to provide for humanity. “The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people’s needs is just not true,” Page said, in an interview at a private event put on by the venture capital firm Khosla Ventures that was just released online.
In fact, today humanity does dumb things like destroy the environment, in part because people work when they don’t have to, Page contended.
The answer isn’t to just cut jobs en masse, Page said. People want to feel “needed, wanted and have something productive to do.” But most everyone would like a little more time off. So perhaps one solution would be to split up part-time work between people, as Page said Richard Branson is experimenting with in the UK.
Page’s co-founder Sergey Brin had a slightly different take. “I do think that a lot of the things that people do have been, over the past century, replaced by machines and will continue to be,” Brin said. But after Page opined about his idea of “slightly less...
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Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Has the Internet Raised or Lowered Healthcare Costs?

The next trip to see the company doctor my be by computer. Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com


Matt Yglesias writes about the awesome power of information technology to diagnose illnesses and save a trip to the doctor:
I was having a kind of weird problem with my left thumb over the course of the past few days....Finally I figured out that it looked to me like an infection of the cuticle....That brought me to a Wikipedia page...."paronychia"....led to a bit more Googling....typically happens to habitual fingernail biters (guilty) or people who've recently been in the water a lot (swimming pool on vacation).
Everyone basically agrees that this isn't a huge deal and that you can obtain some physical relief by occasionally soaking the thumb in hot water while waiting for it to clear up. I took that advice starting yesterday morning, and today I feel a lot better....So there we have it. In a small but real way, information technology reduced the cost of this particular health care service. Productivity for the win.
Obviously there are lots of things we aren't going to treat in this way, but I'm quite optimistic that information technology in the health care sector is going to do us a lot of good.