In The Box Podcast

Episode 3: Robots vs. Humans 2, Customer Service, Disruption And More – Podcast

On this episode of In The Box Podcast, we continued the conversation of robots versus humans, we chat about bad customer service, start a narrative around masculinity, explore the value (or lack of) of Instagram and play with disruption.

Episode 3: Robots vs Humans 2, Customer Service, Disruption

Instagram — What is the value of Instagram?

Robots over humans in service industry — Do you see robots or computer programming dumbing down the service experience of a business?

Bad customer service — Tell me about a bad customer service experience … what would you have done?

Alcohol in Madison — Best place to enjoy an adult beverage in Madison

Narrative around masculine strength — How courage is portrayed in relation to masculinity?

Disruption — Best time for it? worst time for it?

 

Stay Positive & Find A Way To Disrupt

Why These Are The Best Years The World Has Ever Seen

Not even a hundred years ago, everything was work. Food on the table. People relied on each other. You got what you made. Blood, sweat, and tears.

Then we hit the industrial revolution, and as a result, work became less of a worry. What took our attention is all the free time we had. What would we watch on television? What would we listen to on the radio? What activities and groups would we now participate in?

Then the post-industrial revolution happened. This revolution is lead by this current generation. This revolution can be summed up like this:

everything that had become free time, has now become design.

 

Interesting concept... - ImgurAnd if your mind goes to robots designing everything, I would argue that. Sure, robots can help us create things. But they can’t design them ahead of us. We crunched the numbers and wrote the program before a calculator could tell us the square root of 64. So it is with everything that is designed. And I’ll tell you, everything, and I mean everything is being designed.

Will you be a leader of it?

 

Stay Positive & Go On, Design

Garth E. Beyer

 

Robot Journalism

I recently read an article in the New York Magazine titled “The (Robot) Creative Class.” It mentioned that robots are being created to do the work of a comedian, musician, bartender, and – what stood out to me – journalist. It noted that,

Developed with Northwestern University’s prestigious Medill School of Journalism, Chicago-based Narrative Science created a computer program that writes basic news articles like sports-game summaries and earnings reports. It already has at least 30 clients, including Forbes and sports heavyweight the Big Ten Network.

I like to believe that, sure, robots can do the menial parts of what is required of a journalist, heck, possibly robots can have their own genre of journalism, we’ll call it Robot Journalism. I wouldn’t mind reading what a robot thinks.

Would you?

Pushing It & Laziness

There is an action in the middle of the word “pushing” and there is a lot to be taken from it.

Laziness needs to be calculated by the amount of work expected to be done. One can easily be lazy at home by just sitting on the couch with a bag of trail mix while watching a movie. On the other hand, no one calls it lazy when a person does exactly what they are told at their job. They don’t call it lazy because they don’t have high expectations of the person other than to do a mediocre job at what they are told to do. This is a false pretense. Believe it or not – and trust me, it’s a lot harder to believe it, but the benefits outweigh the ones of denying it – you are lazy if you only do what is told of you. Both because what you are told to do is factory work and that the economy has yet to figure out a way to replace you with a machine. But don’t worry, they will be able to soon.

Of course, it doesn’t matter whether a machine is invented to take your place or someone offers to do it at a cheaper price as long as you quit being lazy. To quit being lazy means that you have to start pushing it. Lazy people at work don’t go the extra mile, they don’t ship the product before the deadline (and sometimes not even by the deadline). Nor do they do more than is asked or even ask for more. No. That is what pushers do, productive people, successful people, people who are making the robots to do your job. The pushers are the ones who didn’t just take a stand against laziness, they pushed it away.

There’s a special quality about people who push things forward, push things through and push things up. It has to do with the action inside of the word “pushing”. The pushers became successful because they understood that while they push to be better, their actions tell others to “Sh”. They create different ways to accomplish tasks in such a brilliant way that it mesmerizes others into silence.

Remember those people who said you couldn’t? The truth about pushing it is that you do it to shut them up. You do it to prove yourself right. You do it because you can’t move forward unless you push what’s in front of you.

 

Stay Positive & Don’t Tell Me To “Sh”, Make Me

Garth E. Beyer