Autonomation

This human, the Toyota Production System, and Apple Park

👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.

Photo by Tincho Franco on Unsplash

Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week's clickbait chum and algorithmic feeds. No fluff, and signal over noise⚡️

📚 Reading

🧐 What’s going on here, with this human?

Seeing people clearly—or at least more clearly—matters not just when finding the “best” hire, but in identifying the best role for them. Even looking at those of us who are lucky enough to have a high degree of choice about what we do with our work, I’ll bet that as few as 20% of us are in the seat that best optimizes our talents and skills at any given time—the seat that makes us feel at home in the world. That’s not good for the 80%, and it’s not good for their teams either.

36-minute read by Graham Duncan

💌 The Toyota Production System: A Love Letter

Render unto the machines the things that are legible and repetitive, and unto humans the things that are illegible and novel. It is in this way that the Toyota Production System respects humans – it gives people the type of work at which they are able to generate the most value and feel the most fulfilled. This “cyborg” structure is the best of both worlds.

20-minute read by Taylor Pearson

👩🏻‍💻 Inside Apple Park: first look at the design team shaping the future of tech

An awareness of craft and construction is essential, for there is an acute responsibility that comes with shaping objects that will be made in the hundreds of millions. The economies of scale and the power of the brand give Apple a powerful platform from which to implement change.

17-minute read by Jonathan Bell in Wallpaper*

🎧 Listening

🤖 Getting AI To Think And Learn Like Humans:

If we have a model of the world, we can use it to plan. Because if we can imagine the consequences of actions, that allows us to plan—what Danny calls System 2. Currently, what we can do in Machine Learning is more like System 1: here is an input and here is an output, and that does not require any reasoning. I'm interested in trying to give machines models of the world and to get them to reason.

68 minutes with Daniel Kahneman and Yann LeCun on Big Technology Podcast

🔮 Future of Money, Education, and Health:

So, I tend to be in the camp of people that I don't just think the value of a job is the income. The universal basic income can solve the income part but it can't solve the contribution, productivity, having a purpose, having a reason to get up part, feeling like you're adding value to the world around you, that you are valued, that you have something to contribute. You need a job for that or some interinteraction with the world. And that's going to be a challenge.

82 minutes with Jesse Livermore on Infinite Loops

👨‍👨‍👧‍👧 Buurtzorg and the virtues of humanising, not protocolising:

It starts with human behavior. It starts with how do we deal with each other, how do we take for each other, and then—of course—how to do it in a way that's financially healthy. In my opinion, it should be another way of looking at priorities. So if you take care of people, in a good way, if people can be themselves in the working place, it will also be good for the company.

57 minutes with Jos De Blok on Leadermorphosis

📬 Suggestions?

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