NYTimes: “Amazon is building robots that do everything from moving individual shirts and bottles of soap to neatly stacking packages for the shipping dock. Amazon executives hope these robots will help the company avoid hiring hundreds of thousands of employees in the coming years.”
WSJ reviews “The Origins of Efficiency”: “As Mr. [Brian] Potter puts it, producing goods and services “with fewer resources—improving what we’ll call production efficiency—is the force behind some of the largest and most consequential changes in human history. Efficiency is the engine that powers human civilization.” Economists call this productivity. Mr. Potter’s goal is to use efficiency as a lens to see what that really means and how it is specifically achieved. He begins by noting that all things have a production process involving materials, actions, procedures, people and, of course, technology—whether to clean a house, run a restaurant or build a Cadillac. Efficiency comes from a choreography of tweaks among all those factors, not from any single invention or technique. Mr. Potter provides a master class in how our world produces the “abundance” that “has freed us from a life of near-constant toil.””
Asana founder Dustin Moskovitz: “I think most of people who are tracking AI are waiting for this moment where it’s fully autonomous either for a particular role or for all roles at once, it’s how they define ASI [artificial superintelligence], but there’s this intermediate step where it can do 98% of the work for you and maybe be confident that it correctly did 90% of that, and you could give the human a lot of leverage if you could focus them on the correct 2%-to-10% of what’s remaining and a lot of roles don’t lead to be defined that way.”
Lew Frankfort: “At Coach, I coined the term “magic and logic.” The term is not unique to Coach, of course. It aligns with art and science. What led me to coin that term was a meeting I had scheduled in the late 1980s with the chairman of a Japanese department store, Mitsukoshi, to explain why he should embrace our young New York–based brand and introduce Coach to Japan. I wanted him to understand that we had a 360-degree view of the business. We focused on the product, consumer, brand, and marketplace. I said: There’s a lot of logic and rigor that goes into the business. We look at metrics. We look at trends. We look at the size of the markets. But we also seek to understand how consumers are feeling and what prompts them to buy a bag or an accessory. Why buy a Coach bag and not another bag? What do we need to do to bring the best product to market at the very best possible price? We barely got past the headline of the presentation, which was translated into Japanese, because the chairman and CEO said, “Lew, we need magic. And we need creativity. And it’s a blend of both.” That became a way of life at Coach.”
NYTimes: “If it feels as if gambling is everywhere, that’s because it is. But today’s gamblers aren’t just retirees at poker tables. They’re young men on smartphones. And thanks to a series of quasi-legal innovations by the online wagering industry, Americans can now bet on virtually anything from their investment accounts. In recent years, this industry has been gamifying the investing experience; on brightly colored smartphone apps, risking your money is as easy and attractive as playing Candy Crush. On the app of the investment brokerage Robinhood, users can now buy stocks on one tab, “bet” on Oscars outcomes on another and trade crypto on a third.”
