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Hi, I’m Jamie Condliffe. Greetings from London. Here’s a look at this past week’s tech news:
So Prime Day rolled round, and chances are you bought a Kindle or an electric toothbrush or whatever because, well: cheap!
I say “chances are” because Amazon sold over 175 million products globally during the two-day event this year — more than 2018’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. I don’t know what’s more impressive: that Amazon created a huge shopping holiday in five years, or that it keeps up with the demand.
I mean, how does it meet demand? Well, as The Washington Post reported:
As a “rebinner” at an Amazon fulfillment center outside Minneapolis, Meg Brady says she is expected to handle 600 items per hour, constantly pivoting on her feet to grab one item and place it in a nearby chute. Brady, 55, compared the job to an aerobics workout.
Ms. Brady was among a hundred or so workers at the Shakopee, Minn., facility who went on strike during Prime Day. (Some European workers joined in.)
Fellow pickets at Shakopee held a placard, stating: “We’re human, not robots.” Among their complaints about workplace conditions was that they feel overwhelmed by the rate of work required to keep up with the automated systems.
“Clearly there’s concern over the intensity of work, and whether technology has intensified the work,” said Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist at Oxford University who specializes in technology and employment.
People also view robots as a threat to their jobs: In a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, 58 percent of the respondents said they thought there should be limits on the number of jobs that companies could replace with machines.
In reality, job aren’t automated. Tasks are. That means that working with robots, rather than being replaced by them, is likely to become the norm for many people as companies like Amazon automate to increase productivity and profits.
That the trend is already troubling Amazon employees is a problem for the company, though.
“The biggest barrier to getting technology rolled out is the organizational resistance to adoption,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So companies need a strategy not only for how to get it to work, but also how to get the work force behind getting it rolled out.”
That provides another way to think about Amazon’s recent commitment to spend $700 million on a retaining program for a third of its work force in the United States. That’s a push to make its work force fit for a technologized future, and one no doubt encouraged by the tight labor market.
But it can also be viewed as a way to coax workers into supporting the deployment of more technology. Robots increase productivity and hence profits, and retraining gives employees a clearer view to taking a larger slice of the growing pie.
Whether that will appease the workers in Shakopee remains to be seen.
Antitrust, in the House
Big Tech got an earful about is market power in Washington during the week, but that got us little closer to changing things.
Lawmakers from the antitrust subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee grilled Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google on Tuesday. Representative Joe Neguse, Democrat of Colorado, didn’t mess around, pointing out that Facebook controls four of the world’s six largest social networks (itself, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp).
“We have a word for that,” he said. “It is called monopoly.”
Criticism ran the gamut — from dual roles as seller and platform (hello, Apple and Amazon) to search dominance (howdy, Google) — and came from both parties. Still, not every lawmaker was on the offense: Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, said that “just because a business is big doesn’t mean that it is bad.”
What to make of it? “There’s clearly political interest in this whole area,” said Harry First, an antitrust law professor at New York University.
But, Mr. First added, “substantive things don’t usually come out of these hearings,” and that seemed particularly the case here, where there was so little agreement on the best route forward.
Mr. First invoked a lyric from Buffalo Springfield’s 1966 song “For What It’s Worth” to describe the situation: “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”
Can Libra survive?
President Trump. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The Fed chair, Jay Powell. The International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, Gita Gopinath. The Securities and Exchange Commission. Central bankers from Britain, China, France, Singapore and beyond.
That’s just a handful of the influential critics of Facebook’s new cryptocurrency project, Libra. And joining them this past week were lawmakers, as David Marcus, who leads Facebook crypto initiative, sat through more than six hours of hearings before the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees.
Concerns were numerous. “Facebook’s plans raise serious privacy, trading and monetary policy concerns,” said Representative Maxine Waters of California, the House committee’s Democratic chairwoman. She added that Libra could “yield immense economic power that could destabilize government.”
But the common thread was a deep-seated mistrust of Facebook. Or, as Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, put it:
“Like a toddler who has gotten his hands on a book of matches, Facebook has burned down the house over and over, and called every arson a learning experience. We would be crazy to give them a chance to experiment with people’s bank accounts, and to use powerful tools they don’t understand, like monetary policy.”
Ouch. Everyone loves a challenge, but this seems overwhelming.
Mr. Marcus said during the hearings that Facebook was “owning” its mistakes and “working to remedy them.” And he insisted that the company wouldn’t launch Libra until regulators’ concerns were addressed.
But what will that take? With so many critics, there’s a risk that Libra may require a fundamental redesign, said Jerry Brito, the executive director of Coin Center, a cryptocurrency advocacy group.
“I don’t know whether they will want to move ahead with something like that,” he said.
Some stories you shouldn’t miss
■ Peter Thiel called Google’s China work “seemingly treasonous.” Google denied it; Mr. Trump said his administration would “take a look.”
■ Google and Facebook are tracking you on sex websites. Because, of course they are.
■ When is a photo app a national security threat? When it’s developed in Russia, according to critics of FaceApp. Security researchers said the claims were overblown.
■ Most of the Googlers who organized walkouts have now left. Four of seven of them have resigned since orchestrating protests over the company’s handling of sexual harassment claims.
■ Alan Turing is the new face of Britain’s 50-pound Note. The pioneering computer scientist’s huge achievements in code breaking during World War II were overshadowed at the time by a conviction under Britain’s Victorian laws against homosexuality.
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