Friday Links – 3rd June 2016

A bumper set of links this Friday, partly because I haven’t written one for over a year, and partly because there is quite a lot out there at the moment:

  • Chi Onwurah’s talk to the Hay Festival on the digital revolution and Labour’s role in securing fairness in the new economy: “We should never forget that while change is inevitable progress isn’t.”
  • Nesta have published an interesting comparative review of ten national innovation agencies, from Innovate UK to the USA’s DARPA and Finland’s Tekes
  • Huffington Post Tech has a series on Tech for Good, with contributions from NGOs and startups in the public and social sector, including a piece on London’s role
  • Tom Steinberg writes about two camps in the technology world: the mitigators and promoters: the former sceptical about technology’s social benefits, the latter less so
  • Cassie Robinson blogs on an evolving set of principles of what constitutes Tech for Good, including its ability to benefit the ‘99%’, its purpose, its provenance and more
  • Back in March, Demos Quarterly focused on tech, from AI to blockchains to h+: “technological advance over the last decade in particular has think tanks struggling to catch up” – yup!
  • Also not-new, but there have been a few posts and publications on basic income (partly in response to automation), including The Economist, the RSA and Adam Smith Institute
  • Speaking of automation, the OECD reckon estimates of how many of today’s jobs are at risk are overblown, and take a task-based approach to calculate that 9% of jobs could be automated
  • Lastly and enigmatically, Y Combinator announced HARC: Human Advancement Research Community, with a grand mission statement to “ensure human wisdom exceeds human power”
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