Much has been written (and can proceed to be written) concerning the impact of automation on the labor market. In the short term, many employers have complained about their inability to fill positions and retain employees, further accelerating robot adoption. It is unclear what long-term impact the sort of radical change can have on the labor market in the long run.
However, an often neglected aspect of this conversation is how human staff discuss their robotic colleagues. There is way to be said for systems that enhance or eliminate the more strenuous elements of physical work. But can technology even have a negative impact on worker morale? Both things can actually be true at the identical time.
The Brookings Institute released this week results findings from several surveys conducted over the past decade and a half to evaluate the impact of robotics on the “meaning” of work. Team of advisors thus defines this admittedly abstract concept: :
“When examining what makes work meaningful, we draw on self-determination theory. According to this theory, meeting three innate psychological needs – competence, autonomy and relatedness – is vital to motivating employees and enabling them to feel purpose through their work.
The data was collected from worker surveys conducted in 14 industries in 20 European countries and in comparison with data on robot adoption published by the International Federation of Robotics. Industries covered by the study included automotive, chemical products, food and beverage, and metal manufacturing.
The institute reports a negative impact on employees’ perceived level of meaningfulness and autonomy.
“If the number of robots in the food industry matched that in the automotive industry,” notes Brookings, “we estimate that meaningful work would decline by 6.8% and autonomy by 7.5%. The autonomy aspect speaks to ongoing concerns about whether the implementation of robotics in industrial settings may also make the roles performed by human counterparts more robotic. Of course, the counterpoint has often been made that these systems effectively remove a lot of probably the most repetitive elements of those roles.
The institute further suggests that some of these impacts are felt across roles and demographics. “We found that the negative consequences of robotization for the meaningfulness of work are the same, regardless of the employees’ education level, skill level or the tasks they perform,” we read within the article.
When it involves how you can take care of this alteration, the reply probably won’t be to easily reject automation. As long as robots proceed to have a positive impact on corporate bottom lines, their adoption will proceed to grow rapidly.
Brookings resident Milena Nikolova offers a seemingly easy solution when she writes, “If companies have mechanisms in place to ensure that people and machines work together rather than compete to perform tasks, machines can help improve employee well-being.”
This is one in every of the important thing drivers behind automation firms touting collaborative robotics as an alternative of direct substitute of staff. A contest between humans and their robotic counterparts will almost actually lead to a loss.
Blockchain startups were Things got hot when Katie Haun left Andreessen Horowitz in 2021 to start her own cryptocurrency-focused enterprise capital firm. However, shortly after Haun announced that the two Haun Ventures funds had reached a combined amount of $1.5 billion, cryptocurrency prices plummeted and FTX collapsed.
Despite having a large arsenal of dry powder, Haun Ventures has been slow to get into crypto and web3 on the low-cost, with many observers wondering when the company will pick up its pace of adoption.
While Haun Ventures says it wasn’t exactly sitting on its hands (and capital) during the cryptocurrency market downturn, the company was perhaps more cautious than it initially intended.
But now that bitcoin prices have rebounded to previous highs, Haun Ventures’ investment activity is increasing dramatically. Including some token items, the company has made 48 investments in accelerator funds value $500 million in early-stage and $1 billion in later-stage funding, Haun Ventures told TechCrunch.
The company’s latest investment is Agora – an application that improves voting and other decision-making processes in decentralized autonomous organizations. On Tuesday, the company led a $5 million seed round to Agora, with participation from Seed Club, Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan and others.
Sam Rosenblum, partner at Haun Ventures, said a big barrier to DAO participation was the lack of an easy user interface that may allow members to approve (or vote on) the implementation of software updates to the protocols they manage.
The process was very fragmented. Some decisions were made on a separate Discord channel; “Then (the community) would go somewhere else to vote on whether to allocate treasury dollars to a specific project,” Rosenblum said.
Agora solves this problem for DAO members by providing an easy-to-use community and protocol management solution. “Historically, if you wanted to participate in the allocation of protocol vault resources, you had to perform a number of on-chain activities yourself, which likely meant you had a hardware and software configuration that most people didn’t have,” Rosenblum said.
Agora goals to make it easier for non-technical users to take part in DAO. Rosenblum compared it to Coinbase, which made coin trading simpler for most individuals.
The company was founded in 2022 by Charlie Feng, who co-founded fintech Clearco; Coinbase product designer Yitong Zhang; and software engineer Kent Fenwick.
Agora, which is actually a SaaS offering, is already utilized by protocols reminiscent of Optimisma href=”https://agora.ensdao.org/” goal=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>ENS and Uniswap.
Rosenblum explained that these protocols are pleased to pay Agora since it helps lower the barrier to participation of their community.
While activity in the cryptocurrency world is actually accelerating, Rosenblum didn’t say exactly when Haun Ventures will finish rolling out its current fund. However, he said that investments will proceed next 12 months.
When Keith Rabois announced in January that he was leaving Founders Fund and returning to Khosla Ventures, it got here as a shock to many within the venture capital ecosystem – and never simply because Rabois is a giant name within the industry.
This was surprising because, unlike in lots of other fields, venture capitalists traditionally don’t move fairly often – especially those that rise to the extent of partner or general partner, as was the case with Rabois.
VC funds have a 10-year lifecycle, and partners have a great reason to stay that course. In some cases, they could be “key people” in an organization’s fund, which suggests that in the event that they leave, the fund’s LP investors have the appropriate to withdraw their capital in the event that they so select. Many partners and GPs also invest a few of their very own money of their firm’s funds, giving them another excuse to stick with the firm.
So while it isn’t common for high-profile investors to move into the venture capital space, it seems to have happened in recent months. So far this 12 months, there have been significant cases of investors returning to old corporations, withdrawing from investments on their very own or stopping investing altogether.
Just TodayVic Singh, one in all the co-founders of Eniac Ventures, announced he was leaving the corporate he helped present in 2009 to start his own.
Singh joins a growing list of VCs who’ve recently left corporations.
Startups don’t avoiding large projects. Here’s my takeaway from the news that The Browser Company’s Arc Browser is now generally available to Windows users, just as Island has raised massive capital for its enterprise browser tool. It’s very encouraging to see startups embracing the core elements of technology, not only the apps available on platforms.
Of course, Chrom still reigns supreme, but it surely may take a while to do away with this horse.
Elsewhere in Startup Land on Equity this week, we delved into Chowdeck’s $2.5 million round. This is a Nigerian company that is reporting impressive growth in the sphere of food delivery in a very difficult market. Keep a watch on this as Nigeria is a big market and no single company has a closed delivery operation there. At least though.
We also took a glance New $150M Corelight Fundraisewhich is excellent news to chew on given its valuation and revenue growth.
On the venture front, we covered two stories: First, Intuition’s commitment to the buyer market is particularly interesting. The Paris-based fund is betting that the most effective approach to make as much money as possible is to go against the B2B SaaS narrative. Second, we see the creation of a new venture capital supergroup: Axios informs that investors with experience at a16z, Bessemer and Index are constructing a new company.
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