Cameron Cabo's Thoughts

Likes

Mon, 21 Dec 2020 15:07:00 GMT

Technologies

For life in general:

Privacy.com virtual debit cards.
- Never worry about cancelling a "free" trial or spending money at a small business that you want to support but are afraid is at a higher risk of getting hacked
Strava cardio tracking and social-fitness.
- What if more online communities were like this?
- What if there were a Strava-for-cooking app?
Down Dog workout (HIIT) and yoga apps.\
- A workout app which actually works, keeps things interesting (variety), and does not barrage you with ads
Corners of YouTube where learning is fun and fast.

For software:

Netlify performant and affordable hosting with great developer experience
TypeScript
Deliberate, expressive internal APIs (not just the REST-kind, all code you write is an API for yourself and other devs)
- Reusable components / util functions
- The pipe operator

Foods

The more-good-than-bad kind:

Gnocchi (not too hard to make at home!)
Chicken thighs
Protein shakes—you can easily include a little frozen spinach, seeds, and/or healthy fats
Coffee

The more-bad-than-good kind:

Extra-toasty Cheez-Its
Chewy Chips Ahoy
The universe of sweet and salty items

"Diets"

Intermittent fasting: I generally feel my best when I don't eat until the afternoon
- Not really a "deit" since you don't have to modify what you eat, but rather when
Slow-carb

Activities

Poorly-practiced yoga on the roof
Weight lifting
Reading in the sun
Trail running
Slightly too-competitive pick-up basketball
Cooking, especially with friends or family
Sleep, ideally early to bed and to rise
Road trips
Camping
Hammocking
Anything involving parks

Books

It worked

Sat, 30 May 2020 22:27:00 GMT

About two weeks ago I (virtually) graduated from Penn. The past four years were capped by an odd 3 months of pseudo-quarantine from my house near 42nd and Spruce—about 3 blocks from the campus where I had spent the past 3.75 years working, growing, and having a really good time. My classmates and I were effectively weaned off of college and it's made things seem almost a little...fake? Definitely not as sappy as I'd expected.

In context of the global pandemic and, more recently, the extreme unrest in response to the killing of George Floyd, and the fact that on graduation day Penn's fight song streamed in over Zoom instead of from a set up trumpets blaring on Locust Walk, I've found it effectively impossible to wallow in nostalgia.

Nonetheless, the past three months was a transformative ending to my time at Penn spent with friends both at home and virtually, some new habits, and my last set of classes. I will never forget this time and, juding by the tenuous recovery we are staging from COVID-19 and national reckoning we are having with pervasive racial biases in the systems of all and the hearts of some, it seems like the world won't either.

Anyhoo...I wanted to take a step away from the news and reflect a little...

How I'm feeling

You know that feeling when you refresh the browser and the error no longer flashes up in the Chrome Dev Tools? You finally figured out why the Redux action wasn't being fired? Dope stuff. Or maybe when you finally cracked the memory leak that kept showing up when you made several files in your CIS 380 PennOS file system? Or when you navigated your way through your four years at Penn and walk away with some degrees? Nice stuff.

You always knew you'd eventually fix that Redux problem en route to this app with a feature set you knew you'd eventually be able to deliver on. So why do it? Well, you get better and better every time. You test your productivity. Maybe you work with a new package. You (hopefully) make end users happier. You build stronger bonds with your collaborators. There are a bunch of side effects in getting from point A (no app) to point B (an app) even if you knew you'd always get there. I don't see graduating from Penn much differently.

A product of the system

So not everyone has these experiences, but a lot of people I associate with do. Not everyone has used Redux. Not everyone studies CS or has gone through the Penn CS curriculum. Regardless, a lot of us (perhaps all of us) do things with really low technical risk.

Not everyone walked away from Penn (or their own college, high school, entry level job, ...) in what I would call an "expected" state. Penn is a system. It takes students in, let's them eat up some education, and then plops them out. There are some great things to this system. Great people, engaging content, an exploratory and relatively unrestricted lifestyle, etc.

For me, the Penn system just kinda worked. Yeah I had to refresh the page a few times and fight some bugs and allocation issues, and by no means was it easy, but I made it through without triggering any serious failure modes. For a lot of my friends, the system didn't work quite as smoothly. Also for a lot of my friends, going to Penn presented huge technical risk. Some of my peers took leaves of absence necessitated by mental health emergencies, some were (and still are) strattled by almost incomprehensible levels of debt, some were disillusioned by the educative structures and struggled to find motivation to push on, others weren't quite able to figure out what professors want. There are a whole score of failure modes at Penn and across higher education which many suffer from. The stories of these students illustrate that the system often does not do a good job of helping them out when things do go wrong. These problems certainly need to be fixed. I just happened to not really run into them. I'm lucky and privileged.

I was fortunate to grow up in a really nice town (s/o Wellesley, MA). I went to a pair of really nice high schools. I happened to develop a set of habits which transitioned well to the demands of Penn. I knew what to expect from myself and from a system like Penn. Effectively, I could put my head down, trust the process, and do pretty well.

Why Penn?

If you were to jump back 8 years to when I started high school and tried to forecast to today, there'd be very little uncertainty that I would reach a place much like the one I happen to find myself in today. To the extent that life is about challenging yourself on the path to helping others, why waste the time doing something you (and the people around you) always knew you could do? That's a helluva question and I hope I can come up with a good answer.

I want the answer to be better than "this is what you have to do to get a good job to have a good family to have a good life." I think it's hard to argue that the path I took optimized for growth or impact in the short term. Coming out of these four years I'm in a place where I'm more confident in myself, my habits, and the support systems around me than ever before.

What's cool about a system like Penn (and the education which prefaced it) is maybe you know how it'll help shuttle you from point A to point B but you don't really know what you'll pick up along the way. Sure, I expected to be a part of some extracurriculars, but I couldn't have envisioned building essential software for students at Penn with the most driven, diverse, fun, and inquisitive group of studs that is Penn Labs. I expected to be a part of a unique, storied environment of learning, but I couldn't have foreseen learning about alternative ownership structures or mechanisms for improving cities from instructors who have practiced such teachings their whole careers. I expected to hone my presentation skills, but didn't foresee I'd teach fellow students about JavaScript alongside one of my best friends. There are countless microcommunities and lessons from the past four years that I've been a part of which are pure blessings. This is the stuff you look back on and just feel warm. College is unique. For those who take a pretty straight path through Penn as I did, at the margins we carve out a unique path from being a freshman to being a graduate. So yeah it was a clear path, but, man, was it a good one.

Hopefully I'm a little more well rounded and open to the complexity and diversity of the world in addition to knowing how to write some code and better manage a group of people.

Personality pic of my housemates minus Adam and Kenny 🥺

It continues

People are most productive when they're in systems that fit them. A large point of college is to "test the waters" and get an inkling for what industries, modes of thinking, and types of work make you tick and don't burn you out. Ideally you also get an inkling for what beyond work makes you happy, confident, and at peace with your decisions. Not developing this second set of competencies can make Penn really tough and can make life after it even tougher.

Professor Andrew Lamas, instructor of some of the lessons I mentioned above, encouraged us (his students) to find and follow our own unique "intellectual agenda" which is at the intersection of:

What we like
What we are good at
What the world needs

This seems to be a pretty true statement on a few fronts:

A purposeful life is one of continued learning. I hope to never stop yearning for information, context, and growth post-college.
Life's short. Who know's what's real or what happens when the consciousness is no longer in our heads. We should enjoy the trip.
Contribute back to the world. Keep the ball rolling. Leave a mark. There are people and groups worse off than yourself.

Our intellectual agenda plays out in the systems we find ourselves in. There's a symbiotic relationship here where these two concepts shape each other (Penn is not the same without students and Penn shapes its student , companies are not the same without employees but companies inform what employees work on, ...).

Going back to the whole "it worked" thing, the world certainly didn't need me to get a Penn education. At least, definitely not from a first-order, shorter-term thinking point of view. We put ourselves in the Penn system to optimize for building a strong basis for our respective intellectual agendas and effectively take out a loan on doing work that actually, truly matters. Sure I interspersed my studies with some freelance work, internships, relationship building, and the like, but it's hard to stage any argument much beyond that the last four years were first and foremost for myself. There's probably no greater privilege a 17-22 year old can be given.

I can't wait to build on this foundation and start producing and finding systems with a powerful symbiosis of growth and impact. I can't wait for what's next. I can't wait to find more things that work for me and which, just like Penn, at the margins make life so rewarding.

Classism in the gig economy

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 22:45:00 GMT

The rise of gig economy companies since their founding starting in the mid-2000’s has shifted how many people work, commute, and consume. These companies leverage advances in tech in the software world like mobile and cloud computing to disrupt processes and infrastructure in the physical world. They bring scale and efficiency to services like taxying, food delivery, and lodging via commodification of resources like cars, homes, and labor. While these platforms democratize resources, it is not yet clear if they increase true democratic opportunity in the places they operate. These systems often widen gaps between entry-level workers and platform builders. By design, they can displace more sustainable business models. We must explore alternative forms of ownership and incentive structures within the gig economy to work towards a more equal and sustainable future.

Framework for Evaluating Technology’s Impacts on Society

For strictly technical products, it makes sense to evaluate them on effectively strictly technical criteria. Take, for example, Amazon’s advances in cloud computing.¹ In this case, questions over speed, cost, and friction are all one needs to comprehensively understand the value proposition and impact of the products.

Technology products which alter physical world systems cannot be evaluated on a limited set of strictly technical metrics. Things are different with a company like Uber. Sure, we can ask the simple questions: Is it easier to get from point A to point B? Is it competitively priced with other forms of transit? Cheaper? Safer? On these dimensions, one can make a case Uber is competitive with or superior to services like taxis and public transit. However, Uber’s tech fundamentally changes our real-world systems like how people get around, get paid, and experience the world. The implications go far beyond surface level metrics.

In a few years, with swaths of Ubers clogging streets, is that better for cities?² Or when investment is diverted from public transit to subsidize profitability of rideshare services, is that better for all people?³ These are thorny questions which cannot be answered directly. In these cases, a strictly more technical solution is not strictly better. We need people-based and environment-oriented solutions.

The same logic applies when thinking about these platforms in terms of workers instead of in terms of consumers. In strictly technical advances, tech can be pretty good for leveling the playing field. Going back to the case of cloud computing, it’s easier to rent out computing space today than ever before.⁴ If I want to launch a website, instead of buying my own server I can lease out space at little to no cost starting out. Though there are questions about who owns these servers and who profits (normally big tech companies), this is a competitive field and the benefits to workers (those making apps, those building cloud computing systems) keep improving.

In the case of rideshare companies, the reality is again more muddled. Uber deliberately calls itself a software company, trying to abstract itself from the real-world problems that it must deal with. In a Terms of Service update for drivers in late November of this year, Uber included "you acknowledge and agree that [Uber] is a technology services provider that does not provide transportation services."⁵ This is indicative of Uber’s efforts to skirt around the impact it has on very real physical systems.

Rideshare’s Disruptive Predecessors

To understand impacts which rideshare companies may have on society, it’s important to understand what came before them.

The rise of public transit has its roots in fragmented, profit-seeking private companies. Trolleys, for example, leveraged new tech in motors and manufacturing to replace horse-drawn carriages.⁶ Well-financed companies sprung up across metropolises like Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. They struck partnerships and tried to make money through other avenues like real estate and utilities. Regardless, revolutionizing transit for whole cities was costly and risky. Government regulation forced them to keep fares low and to service underrepresented parts of cities. This made it harder to stay private and profit. Many companies failed to strike financial viability, leading to consolidation and, eventually, shutdown or conversion into government entities.⁷

The rise of taxis was another disruptive battleground. Over decades lacking regulation, various taxi companies rose and fell in NYC alone. The implementation of the medallion system to limit supply and fix rates ultimately tamed the market.⁸ Medallions proved good for drivers and the city with mixed impact on riders (higher fares and less frequency, but greater safety and dependability).⁹ Similar schemes exist in other major US cities.^{10, 11}

Medallion systems also spawned new underground economies. Medallion owners lease out their vehicles and medallions to other drivers to take shifts. Just a few weeks ago, London revoked Uber’s right to operate in the city, in large part because drivers were getting around supply limits by sharing identities on Uber.¹² It’s easy to draw parallels between rideshare operations of today and transit disruption of old.

Rideshare platforms also benefit from car culture, which is particularly pervasive in the US. Most trips in the US are less than one mile long but we often decide to drive.¹³ This has led to urban decay and sparser cities which are less friendly to public transit and pedestrians.¹⁴

Business Standing of Rideshare Companies

"[The] heavily regulated [taxi sector] had seen little innovation over the prior century, leaving customers to cope with an expensive, inconvenient service that rarely seemed available when most needed. Enter Uber, who incorporated widely available technologies – GPS, Google Maps and mobile computing – into a well-designed app to create a customer pleasing, smartphone-enabled urban transportation service."¹⁵

Rideshare is at an inflection point: growth is slowing, and companies are transitioning from growth-oriented to stability-oriented mindsets as they mature and as investors expect returns. Uber lost in excess of $3.2 billion dollars in 2017 and has raised net $11.5B in funding.¹⁶ Lyft and other rideshare companies are in similar financial holes.¹⁷

Rideshare companies also operate at significantly larger scales in terms of riders and drivers than taxi systems. There is a maximum of 13,587 taxi medallions in NYC, while in excess of 60,000 rideshare cars operate in NYC.¹⁸ Moreover, rideshare companies operate in many places like suburban towns where there are no taxi services.

Rideshare and its Impacts on People

Rideshare platforms are architected to offload cost and risks onto drivers. Platforms like Uber entice drivers to sign up with locked-in bonuses and promises of flexibility and freedom.¹⁹ Rideshare companies pitch themselves as paths to financial wellbeing, but incentives are not well aligned. Rideshare companies benefit most when they pay just enough for most drivers to stick around. Columbia Business School professor Len Sherman put it well: “Uber has squeezed the revenues available to compensate drivers, who are ultimately responsible for providing the labor, equipment, maintenance, insurance and fuel to serve consumers.”²⁰

In class, we discussed how poor people often aspire to own homes and cars, but these purchases fail to be good stores of wealth: cars depreciate and houses in poor neighborhoods often lose land value.²¹ Rideshare platforms deliberately push ownership risk off of their books onto vulnerable drivers. For example, to start out as a driver you have to buy a car. Rideshare companies are happy to finance these cars under terms which force workers to drive to pay them off, often coming at a real cost significantly higher than more traditional rental loans.²² This scheme preserves a theme of the course: “anything that poor people own diminishes in value the second they buy it.”²³ There’s a two-sidedness to rideshare’s value proposition: sure there’s flexibility, but only if you have the wealth to start off with. For a retired former middle-class worker, driving for Uber can be a good way to spend time and make some money. For a poor unskilled worker with financial obligations, Uber can be a trap with no way out.

As a driver, there’s no vertical mobility. In rideshare, the only mechanism to grow your personal business as a driver is to drive more. There’s no path to management or ownership, only more rides. This is, if anything, a more extreme version of already inequal management structures in place in taxi systems because of the increased scale of operations (Uber is multi-national, taxi conglomerates are at most multi-city) and increased abstraction between different parts of the marketplace by virtue of distributed software. This is a dangerous trend where the skilled workers in society (engineers, operators) get more skilled wealthier while unskilled workers have fewer opportunities for growth or access to capital.

These themes are all tied together by rideshare companies’ persistent efforts for their drivers to be classified as contractors rather than employees.²⁴ Under this scheme, they are not required to pay benefits to workers and assume less risk. To be fair, contractors have greater flexibility in terms of when and how they work though hopefully there is some middle ground which gives both drivers and companies flexibility and mutual accountability. Regulation in this space has been slow to catch up.

Large marketplace systems also have psychological impacts on society. Rideshare services are highly transactional in nature. Even with taxi systems, you flag down drivers or talk to dispatchers on the phone to get a ride. When Lyft first started out, it stressed the people side of its network: Lyft encouraged drivers and passengers to fist bump as a mechanism for breaking the ice before their journeys.²⁵ As these systems have matured, they have moved towards being API’s for logistics rather than conduits for transit and conversation alike. Rideshare companies’ large investments in self-driving vehicles are an indication that this trend will be taken to the absolute extreme.²⁶

In class, we discussed how Penn students are manufactured to be consultants which can be “helicoptered in anywhere.” By virtue of our pre-professional education, we “have the privilege that work can give our lives meaning.” Rideshare drivers too can be called on the whim and dropped into any situation where they are needed, though they are increasingly an implementation detail rather than a differentiated component.

I’d like to note that there are many exceptions to these trends and, for many groups, gig economy opportunities provide the purpose and payment which make them happy and well off.²⁷ That being said, the lack of incentive alignment and negative externalities ranging from increased wealth and skill gaps, increased pollution and congestion, and increased urban sprawl are alarming problems which we should address.

Considering Alternative Solutions

Rideshare's mission aligns with De Soto’s argument that everyone is better off when assets are made as liquid as possible.²⁸ De Soto gives the example of abstracting away property ownership from property use in poor areas of South America, allowing richer investors to bring money in to local economies, maximizing the value of otherwise “dead capital.” Rideshare companies do the same thing for labor and car ownership.

There are issues with De Soto’s argument: whoever starts with capital tends to benefit the most, and many towards the bottom have no form of meaningful ownership. There’s nothing to stop investors from taking advantage of those living on the property they buy up or to make sure that investments are sustainable. Uber VC’s, founders, and engineers own stake in the company while drivers have no path to ownership besides buying shares in public markets. Yes, people could earn income from opening their property to the market, but there’s an inherent differentiator which they lack: capital. Partnerships and long-term strategic plans are the only way to effectively combat this disadvantage.

One possible solution is a better distribution of wealth. As was put in class, real-world systems are a “buffet” where everyone who contributes should have claims on the end product.²⁹ Driver churn is a huge issue for rideshare companies and, as a result, they spend heavily on incentive programs to win drivers over.³⁰ Juno was a rideshare company based out of NYC which gave drivers greater portions of fares and had an equity split agreement with drivers based on their tenure with the company. However, upon getting acquired in 2017, they removed the equity split and gradually lost faith with drivers, ultimately shutting down in November of 2019.³¹ Juno failed to carve out enough whitespace between its larger competitors. If Juno’s strategy were employed by a market leader like Uber, it could shift the entire industry onto a more sustainable and equitable trajectory. This could turn rideshare companies into partially worker-owned co-ops, more accountable to their drivers and their futures.³²

Another important side of rideshare is its lack of accountability to scale sustainably. As discussed, private trolley companies were effectively forced to price and operate in ways that serviced lower-income portions of cities. At the moment, the only incentive for rideshare companies to play well with public transit is to get on the good side of regulators and build out their own brands.³³ This can be labelled a strategy credit.³⁴ Regulators could push for stronger, more integrated public-private partnerships in the space to subsidize connections with public transit, thereby strengthening city transit and reducing congestion which, to this point, has been made worse by rideshare services.

Looking Ahead

Something is bound to change in the coming months: rideshare companies can neither be largely unregulated nor largely unprofitable for much longer. The question is how much will change. If rideshare companies keep their current course, my guess is labor markets will suffer from greater inequality and cities will struggle to renew and scale their public transit systems. Smart restructuring could position rideshare’s unique tech and platforms to advance the aims of transit systems and to enable drivers to benefit from the value they create.

Disclaimer: this is an adapted version of my final paper for URBS 452: Community Economic Development at the University of Pennsylvania. The paper built on learnings from class and from URBS 419: Urban Transit in Flux, also at the University of Pennsylvania.

¹ aws.amazon.com/

² vox.com/the-goods/2019/8/6/20757593/uber-lyft-traffic-congestion-pricing

³ gothamist.com/news/l-train-shutdown-study-calls-for-subsidized-uber-rides-electric-scooters

⁴ azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/what-is-cloud-computing/

⁵ dropbox.com/s/9uoghcrag1xbcyn/Rasier%20Technology%20Services%20Agreement%20November%2025%2C%202019.pdf

⁶ fastcompany.com/3056341/a-brief-history-of-streetcars-in-nyc

⁷ phillytrolley.org/Phila_trolley_history_1924/Phila_trolley_history_1924.html

⁸ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_New_York_City#History

⁹ forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2017/12/14/why-cant-uber-make-money

¹⁰ philapark.org/taxis-limos/

¹¹ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_medallion

¹² venturebeat.com/2019/11/25/uber-loses-license-to-operate-in-london-one-of-its-biggest-markets/

¹³ epa.gov/greenvehicles/what-if-we-kept-our-cars-parked-trips-less-one-mile

¹⁴ Jakle, John A., et al. Lots of parking: Land use in a car culture. University of Virginia Press, 2004.

¹⁵ forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2017/12/14/why-cant-uber-make-money

¹⁶ forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2017/12/14/why-cant-uber-make-money

¹⁷ latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-lyft-ipo-disclosure-20190307-story.html

¹⁸ forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2017/12/14/why-cant-uber-make-money

¹⁹ uber.com/us/en/drive/

²⁰ forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2017/12/14/why-cant-uber-make-money/

²¹ Class discussion

²² marketplace.org/2015/05/13/uber-drivers-struggle-pay-subprime-auto-loans/

²³ Professor Lamas in class

²⁴ nytimes.com/2019/05/14/business/economy/nlrb-uber-drivers-contractors.html

²⁵ gigaom.com/2014/11/26/lyft-distances-itself-from-the-fist-bump/

²⁶ uber.com/us/en/atg/technology/

²⁷ forbes.com/sites/jonyoushaei/2015/02/04/the-uberpreneur-how-an-uber-driver-makes-252000-a-year/#7db8a4d34e8e

²⁸ De Soto, Hernando. “The mystery of capital.” Finance and Development 38.1 (2001): 29-33.

²⁹ Class discussion

³⁰ theinformation.com/articles/how-uber-will-combat-rising-driver-churn

³¹ theverge.com/2017/6/19/15832432/gett-juno-class-action-lawsuit-drivers

³² en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

³³ blog.lyft.com/posts/2018/6/6/how-lyft-works-with-public-transit-agencies-across-the-country-to-eliminate-transportation-barriers

³⁴ stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/

The ethics and macroeconomics of automation

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 02:00:00 GMT

For many people work is a source of purpose. This is because work itself can be purposeful and so too can it finance purposeful activities outside of work. Note that "purpose" means different things to different people: in more well-off areas like the US "purpose" can be partaking in more creative activities, in more developing areas "purpose" can be having better access to education. Regardless, purposeful activities make us more fulfilled in life which should be the end goal of what we do—a notion which Aristotle called the "final good."¹

Per this framework, advances in workplace tech should aim to (1) advance how purposeful our lives are within work or (2) advance how purposeful our lives are outside work. This relation between purpose, work, and technology has largely been advantageous in the past, where better tech has led to more purpose. For example, it is easier today to access computing resources and information than ever before, allowing for more analytical work. This has been the case because new tech has historically led to new jobs. However, this dynamic will fundamentally change if automation reaches the point where fewer jobs are created than are consumed. In light of this, companies which benefit most from automation are ethically obligated to invest in reskilling and reorienting displaced workers. Incentives must be aligned such that companies do not replace workers with machines strictly on an economics basis but rather focus on the longer-term, purpose-altering effects of automation. What does it mean if it is more efficient for a subset of the population to not work? How can we promote more equality in this scenario? Investing in education and reskilling today is a productive way to attack these problems.

1. Historically, automation has net-created jobs; this will likely change going forwards

Studies conducted in the past confirm that more jobs are created than are removed as tech advances.² Companies like Amazon, the leaders in warehouse automation, are quick to provide their own evidence that they have added more jobs than they have automated away.³ This argument gives a skewed picture of reality: for a company growing net sales exponentially as it expands to new markets, adding jobs is simply scaling to meet demand.⁴ Additionally, this does not mean that Amazon is net adding jobs when considering companies which they outcompete along the way. The same can be said of Walmart, Ocado, and other automation-focused supply chain companies. These companies thus have a duty to hold themselves accountable to whatever societal shifts they cause on the consumer, technical, and labor fronts.

2. Manufacturing and supply chain companies determine the wellbeing of a significant portion of humanity

Regardless of the direction and magnitude of automation going forwards, the potential for impact is immense. Amazon employs more than 647,000 people.⁵ Walmart hires an astounding 2.2 million people.⁶ Tens of millions more work full-time as suppliers, contractors, and aggregators on top of the Amazon and Walmart marketplaces. Any shift to employment will have profound economic and societal implications on all direct and indirect employees. Given the scale of this impact, these companies are obligated to ensure stable, healthy navigation of these shifts. As it is, many employed by these companies are dissatisfied. Indeed, Amazon warehouse workers have described the work as grueling, depressing, and robotlike.⁷ For at least a subset of these people, their current professional state is suboptimal and could surely be improved with shifts in the labor market.

3. Assuming no technical risk, it makes economic sense for automation to net remove jobs in the long-run

Technology has, quite obviously, significantly shaped how the workforce is distributed. As summarized by economist Elvira Nica, “As the cost of computing power has decreased, computers and robots have progressively taken the place of employees in carrying out unambiguous, codifiable undertakings.”⁸ More recently, the exponential rise of big data and data analysis have made more non-repetitive, dynamic, and large-scale tasks possible to computerize, as well.⁹ That is, decision-making is in part transferring from people to servers and neural nets. If this trend continues, there will be less and less work-based decision-making for people to take on which technology cannot itself perform. Additionally, if the rate of change in automation is exponential in nature as research indicates, eventually people may not be able to reskill at the rate that technology reshapes the workforce.¹⁰

Economically, automation makes sense: as Nica argues, “Insofar as digital technologies are employed for the intentions of surplus value production, they will generate results that are satisfactory for capitalist employers and detrimental for employees.”¹¹ The scalable nature of tech means that a company can command a whole market with less labor and less redundancy. Amazon pushing operational efficiency onto its workers is a short-term market imperfection: these people should be paid comparably to do other, more enriching work and technology should eventually automate these functions. Whether in the short-term policy needs to counteract difficulties these workers face is a different (incredibly important) question.

3. Work plays a very important role in human psychological wellbeing

While at once automation promises to remove more drudging, dull aspects of work, so too is it increasingly overriding actions which make us feel autonomous. Law professor John Danaher warns even that “the automation of labor could rob us of meaningfulness…the necessary causal and mental link between our actions and the outcomes that are said to be constitutive of meaning.”¹² Research and surveys have indicated, for example, that a large portion of the United States population would still work even if not economically compensated for their work. People want to feel like they are contributing members of society—to be a part of something bigger than themselves.¹³ To maintain this utility of work, whatever roles people take on must maintain this connection to society and this notion of contribution.

4. Life without work could be more meaningful than life with work

Research has indicated that much human satisfaction is derived from “flow-state-inducing activities” which can be obtained through work or through non-work.¹⁴ Much automation cuts out work with few longer-term implications (for example repetitive tasks) which are unlikely be flow-state-inducing. Moreover, much of the work we do is predictable and static which can be eliminated by smart automation.¹⁵ This is why automation largely to this point has been useful: it enables people to specialize in the activities they value the most. Down the line, if automation takes away certain flow-states in work, people should work to find similar flow in other areas such as their communities or families. People want to create and inspire regardless of the context. As a society, we are very focused on the notion of work but fail to assess how much of an opportunity cost it is relative to other meaningful pursuits.¹⁶

The first fundamental canon of the NSPE’s Code of Ethics is to “Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.”¹⁷ Engineers implementing solutions which displace workers must ensure that these workers are indeed better off, either in new forms of work or outside of work. Investing in alternative forms of education and community programs are strong ways to open up opportunities for non-work flow-states and passions.

5. Conclusions

Having established (1) that incentives are aligned economically for the continued roll out of automation and (2) the potential moral upside to automation, we should continue to research it, implement it, and most importantly measure its progress. As mentioned, companies the likes of Amazon and Walmart have enormous societal impact in rolling out new tech. As they are the ones driving this innovation and, in the process, widening their competitive moats, they should be required to carefully manage transitions of labor.

A key consideration is equality: there will certainly be uneven deployment of automation between regions and companies.¹⁸ Amazon, for example, will benefit far more quickly from its own automation in the US than Jumia in Nigeria. Likewise, technological unemployment will funnel funds away from laborers towards managers, increasing income inequality.¹⁹ This threat to equality is why technology leaders have historically supported ideas the likes of universal basic income and automation taxes.²⁰ In a society where not every individual is expected to work, we will need new models for distributing wealth and meaningful work which go beyond the fundamentals of capitalism.

Disclaimer: this was written for EAS 203: Engineering Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. The assignment, titled “Communicating with the Public”, was to give my perspective on an emerging field of technology and its ethical implications.

¹ Jacobs, Julian D. “Utilitarianism and the Market Economy.” Brown Political Review, Brown Political Review, 12 Apr. 2017, brownpoliticalreview.org/2017/04/utilitarianism-market-economy/..

² Denise, Malcolm L. “Automation and unemployment: a management viewpoint.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 340, no. 1 (1962): 90-99.

³ Day One Team. “5 Facts to Know about Amazon Robotics.” EU Day One Blog, Amazon, 5 Sept. 2018, blog.aboutamazon.eu/innovation/5-facts-to-know-about-amazon-robotics.

⁴ Statista. “Net sales revenue of Amazon from 2004 to 2018 (in billion U.S. dollars)”, Statista, Statista, 2019, statista.com/statistics/266282/annual-net-revenue-of-amazoncom/.

⁵ Lieber, Chavie. “Emergency Calls Placed from Amazon Warehouses Depict Enormous Pressure Put on Workers.” Vox, Vox, 11 Mar. 2019, www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/11/18260472/amazon-warehouse-workers-911-calls-suicide.

⁶ Walmart. “Company facts.” Newsroom, Walmart, 2019, corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/company-facts

⁷ Chavie Lieber, “Emergency Calls Placed form Amazon Warehouses.”

⁸ Nica, Elvira. “Will technological unemployment and workplace automation generate greater capital-labor income imbalances?” Economics, Management and Financial Markets 11, no. 4 (2016): 68.

⁹ Elvira Nica, “Will technological unemployment.”

¹⁰ Danaher, John. “Will life be worth living in a world without work? Technological unemployment and the meaning of life.” Science and engineering ethics 23, no. 1 (2017): 41-64.

¹¹ Elvira Nica, “Will technological unemployment.”

¹² John Danaher, “Will life be worth living in a world without work?”

¹³ Morse, Nancy C., and Robert S. Weiss. “The function and meaning of work and the job.” American sociological review 20, no. 2 (1955): 191-198.

¹⁴ John Danaher, “Will life be worth living in a world without work?”

¹⁵ Parrish, Shane. “Smarter, Not Harder: How to Succeed at Work.” Farnam Street, 19 June 2018, fs.blog/2018/06/succeed-at-work/.

¹⁶ Nof, Shimon Y. “Automation: What it means to us around the world.” In Springer handbook of automation, pp. 13-52. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009.

¹⁷ National Society of Professional Engineers, “Code of Ethics.” Ethics. NSPE, 2019.

¹⁸ Shimon Y. Nof, “Automation: What it means to us around the world.”

¹⁹ John Danaher, “Will life be worth living in a world without work?”

²⁰ Morris, David Z. “Bill Gates Says Robots Should Be Taxed Like Workers.” Fortune. Accessed April 21, 2019. http://fortune.com/2017/02/18/bill-gates-robot-taxes-automation/.

What I did this summer

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 16:56:00 GMT

The past three and change months were very much a summer well spent; the people who surrounded me, the places I explored, and the projects I worked on bred an enriching, creative, experimental, and teaching summer season. I thought I'd take the time to reflect on and crystalize what it was I did:

I wrote code and drove decisions at PayPal.

Coming from a relatively small-scale startup in Honey last summer, I sought experience in an established tech powerhouse. I figured (and indeed discovered) that there was much to learn from the processes, protocols, and decision-making behind managing thousands of developers and hundreds of millions of customers globally. I coordinated with teams across buildings and across continents to improve a product for users across the street and around the world. I think that's pretty cool.

I worked on an agile team within the branded “Pay with PayPal” app. Our objective was to optimize the app through whatever means possible: A/B testing designs, presenting more granular information to the user, altering how we make API calls, etc. My primary project was to add the functionality to dynamically grant users discounts on their purchases. This project was flexible to its core: supporting fine-tuned user segments across all parts of the world with support for different languages and currencies. Ideally, I laid the groundwork for meaningful incentive marketing campaigns for years to come which truly delight PayPal's users.

Getting my project through the development pipeline was no small feat, as is the reality in any large company. I worked day in and day out not only to build out my piece of the puzzle, but also ensure other teams knew what I was doing and how my project fit into theirs. Informal, quick, and targetted meetings and Slack messages became my best friends. I had to hustle to get my code and vision to production.

The payments space is one of hot competition and global expansion; the winners who emerge must have superior user experiences, network breadth, and technical depth which convert prospective users into loyal customers. In giving thousands of users discounts off their purchases on behalf of PayPal, I hope to have pushed the company's aim to be a customer champion a small yet significant step forwards.

I hustled alongside Adam to get Riplo, our student-led software development studio, off the ground and moving with a full head of steam.

I love the process of building new projects. Each is an opportunity to work with new tech in a new context with a new team--you can iterate quickly, shatter assumptions, and strive to make something users will love. When actively building, I learn and grow the quickest.

Riplo is largely a formalization of a process that has been underway for a few years. The objective is to fill a market gap: my coworkers and I want to learn through building, and our clients want the next wave of web and mobile innovation.

If you want to learn more, get involved, or have something built, check out our website.

I worked on a fantastic team to bring Nalda to production.

Nadla, is Riplo's first large-scale client. Nalda is a food, drink, and event discovery platform for college campuses. At the moment, we are focusing on creating a beautiful web experience for Penn, though more locations, features, and a mobile app are in the near-term pipeline.

We've worked closely with design and content teams to build for our target users. Where platforms like Yelp and Google give reviews and listings, Nalda aims to give opinions, recommendations, and immersive content which manifest as meaningful experiences.

I revamped The Metric with a more feature-rich, sleek, and opinionated UX which its content and content creators deserve.

The Metric was just an idea presented to my by my friend Jason Kim two summers ago; a few weeks ago we surpassed 100 thousand global viewers. It's incredible to have been a part of such measurable progress. The team has built up a diverse and driven network of editors and creators which give unique, opinionated views on the world around us from perspectives you will struggle to find elsewhere.

I'm excited to keep building out new features to further enable our content creators to express themselves and to further enable our readers to understand these perspectives and give their own takes.

When you have a minute, I highly recommend reading some of these truly unique pieces from our website. Also, keep up with our content by liking us on Facebook or following us on LinkedIn.

I explored California, deciding to spend my time either very much at work or very much removed from it.

We're pretty fortunate that when we look at the world, we largely are pleased by what we see. It's almost odd that we can be paralyzed by the power of the sun rising or stunned by the scale of mountains. If you think about it, it doesn't have to be that way.

I find myself happiest after an unplanned, dynamic, and draining weekend exploring. Few things are better than marvelling at the unique beauty around us and better understanding our role within it. In line with this, I made an effort to spend as many weekends engrossed in this type of exploration as possible.

There's a lot more to what makes humans happy and purposeful than computers, skyscrapers, and networks.

All I got is a little bit of space and time drawing shapes and lines of the world we made
Mac Miller on Small Worlds

I learned an incredible amount from the people around me, and I am incredibly energized for year 3 at Penn.

My fellow PayPal interns are now some of my best friends. I'm excited to keep in touch and see where our adventures through tech and beyond take us. I spent the beginning and end of my summer at home catching up with high school friends and enjoying days in the sun with my mom, dad, brother, grandma, uncle, and dog.

I'm really fortunate to have the opportunity to lead the life I'm leading. This summer was an incredible mix of fun, travel, uncertainty, and belonging. Always keep in mind that when you look back on your experiences, you largely remember the triggers, transitions, peaks, and troughs the most. I'm fortunate to say that I have a lot of those.

Life is moving absurdly quickly—one moment I'm in Philly, the next LA, the next San Jose; one moment I'm building an incremental improvement on one of the world's largest fintech platforms, the next I'm scrapping together a company of my own, the next I'm navigating a dirt road high above Lake Tahoe, the next I'm studying harder than seemingly ever before to glean the most possible from my time at Penn...

I choose the word "absurdly" because I struggle to wrap my head around the progress and dynamism around me every day. I go to bed with my head spinning and wake up at once charged, confused, and passionate. I'm pretty troubled by many things going on in the world at large from the environment, to Pittsburgh, to the border, to Syria, to Brazil. It's easy to feel powerless in light of things like this. And yet every day is a day to grow, learn, and hopefully have an impact on others or at least put yourself in a better position to have impact further down the line.

Reflections on sophomore year

Sat, 23 Jun 2018 21:40:00 GMT

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that this year was quick. By that, I mean truly scarily and excitingly quick. To give some context, I recently completed my sophomore year at Penn. Many people are quick to remind me that I am now halfway done with college (for the record, there's no need to remind me or any of my peers—we are well aware that college is zooming by).

Time is an incredibly valuable resource, but so too are things that you can derive directly in exchange for time. We complete time-based transactions daily, be they for percentage points on tests, better grades on assignments, learning, money, mentorship, a more relaxed mind, a healthier body, a stronger friendship...

In order to have gotten to where each of us is today, we leveraged some level of time management. I prefer the term time optimization because it gets to the root of the problem: we have limited time and, as a result, in everything we do we should aim to make the most of it.

Such optimization is unique to each person so I won't touch on that, specifically. Rather, I want to discuss some interesting facets of time and what we can do to make the most of said facets.

In terms of perceived duration, a minute on the treadmill is not "equal" to a minute relaxing on the beach. Likewise, a minute five years ago is not "equal" to a minute right now. This is to say, time is at once quite fluid and rigid; it is absolutely consistent in its literal passing though absolutely inconsistent in its perceived passing. It follows that different ways of divvying up our time will lead to different perceptions of that very same time in terms of length and significance.

A pitch for consistency

I love being consistent. There's a certain freedom to preparedness: complete your assignments before they are due and you have time to explore new avenues; be proactive and productive at work and you have time to learn more from others and exceed expectations; exercise early and leverage that mindset to take on the rest of the day. Do this consistently and you set a tone of efficiency and efficacy day-in and day-out. I find few things more rewarding than that.

To test this, I've maintained some personal analytics over this past year to install more consistency in my day-to-day routine (warning, a little nerd is about to come out).

Plug for peeping my GitHub if you so desire.

For starters, I want to continually get better at building technical products. To this aim, I've sought to build projects as many days as possible over the past year. Similarly, I wanted to get stronger and generally healthier. Since January first, I've exercised all but 20 days and have kept to a consistent workout rotation. In both cases, consistency has proven a sure means of gleaning the results I desired.

There is a guaranteed amount of consistency in any collegiate or professional setting: there are weekly deliverables, set meeting times, and delineated expectations. Ensuring that you are making consistent progress on top of these expectations, be it in software, fitness, or any other pursuit, is central to maximizing learning and growth.

Having established this glowing upside, I now want to touch on the negatives of too much consistency.

The qualification of cyclicity

To be quite honest, I didn't know this was a word until I started writing this post, decided that I wanted to use this word, and consulted Google for affirmation (Cyclicity: n., the quality or state of being cyclic). Daily routines are often conducive to establishing and maintaining productivity: get in, get tasks done, and move on. But there is a caveat to this: we can get trapped in these daily routines and they can limit us from experiencing the incredible variety that life and our world present.

It's tough to delineate between too little and too much. I'm certain, however, that this line is often crossed in college where your weekly calendar of classes, assignments, and meetings is inherently repetitive and highly demanding. At times, and depending on your approach to this repetition, routines can succumb to monotony. As humans we fail to learn or enjoy as much when in monotonous situations. We like dynamism, excitation, and using our brains in new and challenging situations. There were stretches this year where I felt very much caught in such a cycle, and, in this context, the weeks and months passed by rapidly.

I claim consistency is great for building expectations, though cyclicity is the bane of personal progress. Time optimization is the art of striking the happiest of happy mediums between these states.

Integrating dynamism into your daily routine

Many who know me well know that I'm relatively spontaneous. A few days ago, for example, my roommates and I engaged in a banana peel throwing contest; a week before that, I tried (and failed) to suspend my hammock from three stories up a tree. I find myself most excited and engaged when I'm exploring new concepts, places, and actions. In these situations I'm exposed to new things and I feel that I grow through these unique experiences.

At the same time, without a consistent routine it's too difficult to track, measure, and enforce progress. When lost in a cycle, it's all too easy to forgo any semblance of spontaneity, deferring instead for the accepted, regular, and pervasive. My conclusion? Consistently prioritize dynamism in your daily routine, and aim to get the most out of the expected and unexpected alike.

The art of leg breaking—dealing with expected and unexpected change

Mon, 21 Aug 2017 06:55:00 GMT

Just about a year ago today, I was on the sandy beaches of La Jolla enjoying my last few days before my freshman year at Penn with my mom, dad, grandma, and uncle. We were staying at a rental we’d visited every summer the past three years. Playing and lounging in the sun, this was a celebration at once of the past and of times to come—pretty momentous and also pretty damn fun.

Naturally, it was at this time that a particularly nefarious wave decided to hit me in just the perfect way to lodge my knee in the sand with enough leverage to hurt—a lot. A nice trip to the UCSD ER and 6 hours of waiting would later reveal that I’d broken my femur and would have to undergo 2 surgeries, 3 months without bearing weight on my leg, and 12 months of dull muscular and skeletal pain. Today, I’m left with a 10 inch scar up my left leg; a leg which is still 2 inches smaller in circumference than my right one (update: this is no longer the case).

Before and after X-rays, for your enjoyment:

Muscular atrophy. Nice.

I still went to school, crutched my way across campus at day and hoisted myself off of worn crutches into my bed at night. I stretched twice a day, went to PT twice a week, had to sit down twice to put on pants, and stood on one leg in the shower. It sucked but so too did it become my way of life. To a select few, I was even known as “crutch boy.” Most pertinently, I was by chance forced into this position and I made the choice to adapt as best I could.

Many people have been through far worse things of far greater pain, strife, and duration, though this incident forced me to better understand the importance of adaptability and change itself. The cliche that “the only constant in life is change” points to the fact that change, both expected and unexpected, is what defines your experiences. The places, jobs, and schools you choose to go to, the friends you make by chance or choice, and the difficult things forced upon you are what most strongly contribute to your life and who you become.

My femur fracture showed me that change, although not always good, is always powerful. Change is definitive and each change is an opportunity to learn, grow, and get better at dealing with change. Change can come at any time. Rather than avoiding change, find meaningful change and make the most of it, even when it’s forced on you.

I’ll be writing about this, specifically, over the coming weeks, and I’ll also be working to make my legs the same size. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

Update: I did not write more about this, though I've gotten my leg up to strength and I'm back to normal athletic activity. Thanks for the support.

Building the blog—the thought process

Tue, 30 May 2017 23:21:00 GMT

I took a lot of time over the past few weeks building a product I hope to use for the next many years of my life--what you are engaging with right now is a revamped personal website and integrated personal blog. To begin this new blog, I thought it best to delve into the philosophy and motivations surrounding it.

Admittedly, I spent a lot of time debating the utility of either of these online features (the website and the blog) ever since I published my first personal website years back in high school. Even further, I've spent considerably more time weighing the advantages and disadvantages of building the features myself rather than going through popular website and blog providers. Over this past year, however, a selection of interactions, talks, and experiences convinced me that this specific site is what I wanted to build and that I wanted to pivot away from some of the presentation choices I made in my original website.

Lessons learned, points taken

"Medium is not for everyone, but it is accessible to everyone."

I don't remember the setting or speaker for this quote—surprising given how much it has stuck with me. I do, however, remember hastily tracking it down in my Google Keep immediately after hearing it to ensure I would never forget it.

Medium is a beautiful service. It's interface is sleek, malleable, and does nothing but add to the content posted on it. Anyone can read a Medium post and thoroughly enjoy it.

In this quote is a valuable business lesson: know your consumer and know what they want to get out of your platform. Don't build features and dilute your product to design it for people who aren't your target users to begin with. Even still, having limited and refined features and functionality does not mean access to the product must or should be.

Returning to the quote, not everyone is or wants to be an active Medium user. Those who are enjoy introspective, reflective, and softly-opinionated pieces. This is where the objectives of Medium and my own objectives at times split far enough for me to find worth in developing a platform integrated to my personal site.

Yes, I want to write pieces which reflect on experiences and look ahead, though so too do I want to write about what I've worked on, on new technologies and trends, and on whatever else I find interesting. Further, I want to be able to organize my thoughts in a way not restricted by a generalized platform which is for a far wider audience. Last of all, I want my thoughts and writing to be directly connected to my other experiences, projects, and work. In this sense, Medium is not (entirely) for me. For the posts which I do fit Medium's platform, I'll be sure to cross-post with my Medium account.

If you think you are building a personal brand, you will not have the career you want because you will not be authentic.
Sheryl Sandberg

Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg's talk at Penn gave each attendant much to consider. They discussed topics ranging from grief, to gender inequality, to the search for success and meaning. The above quote, in particular, made me reconsider the way I presented myself, my projects, and my learning and growth.

Sandberg stresses a key difference between one's personal brand and one's personal image—the latter natural and real, the former forced and deceptive. In looking at my website in this context, I realized I was more so constructing a personal brand than uplifting my personal image. Thus, in building the second iteration of my website, I worked towards more modest and straightforward graphics, typefaces, and layouts which focused on information, concepts, and learning above all else.

"Keep in mind that, above all, motivation and purpose are key."
Joshua Davidson, CEO & Founder of Chop Dawg

This quote goes without saying, though it was in context of this talk during a YouthHack Sunday Session that it proved so impactful.

Josh is a highly driven entrepreneur who did and continues to do whatever he can to build long lasting products. Even in just 15 minutes of talking to him I learned an incredible about personal drive and project-based learning through the stories he told about hustling for clients and knowledge alike. I aimed to channel that spirit in developing a platform of my own to explore, discuss, and build upon my interests.

Moving forwards

As I've hinted at, I want this blog and website on the whole to serve as an extension of my learning and projects. For those interested, it will be a source of information and spirit which I hope you can all build off of and benefit from. Further, this blog will keep me honest and focused with what I build and work on.

Being able to present one's work is arguably more important than the building process itself, and through this platform I hope to develop that skill into a defining strength.