"...This inequity in the field directly affects which products come to market. Caroline Criado Perez’s research documents all the ways that design privileges men in both physical and digital spaces. It’s the reason why car crashes were more deadly for women until recently. It’s the reason that ill-fitting personal protective equipment—from masks to work vests—put the lives of women and people of color at risk. It’s the reason why digital harm is on the rise as social platforms are often not safe for women and people of color. These glaring oversights occur because the teams of designers, engineers, and coders are often homogenous in life, class, and ethnic backgrounds, led more often than not by white leaders, and they end up designing for what they know: people like themselves. Design can be life or death. And tools like HMW exacerbate how design reflects the needs of those who are in positions of power." (Fast Company, 28 June 21)

"...Acemoglu argues that much of the automation we've seen in recent years is "excessive." Businesses are using machines to kill jobs without generating significantly lower production costs, he says, while also imposing all the costs on society that comes with greater unemployment and lower wages. Businesses don't take into account these social costs when making the decision to automate away jobs (economists call these social costs "negative externalities").  Acemoglu says it's not just business that's to blame. Companies may be guilty of excessively automating because they don't factor in all the social costs it creates. But governments are also culpable. In the US, the government, through the tax code, is actually giving companies extra encouragement to automate jobs. That's because it taxes capital at a lower rate than labor and provides all sorts of tax write offs for purchasing machines, software, and equipment." (NPR, 22 June 2021)

"...Traditionally, when a company is hiring engineering talent it might ask about a candidate’s technical skills, but Jensen said that’s not the right question...“I think the more interesting question is: What’s your mindset?” he said. “How do you think about a problem?”  In the past, soft skills were a secondary thing when it came to hiring, an “also want,” he said.  But now he tries to determine whether an engineering or tech candidate has an affinity for learning, if they’ll work well with others, and whether they’ll make innovation a part of their day job." (MIT Sloan School, 15 June 2021)